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THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 




Michigan Avenue, Chicago, from the steps of the Art Institute. 



THE 
VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 



BY 

MEREDITH NICHOLSON 



WITH ILLUSTBATION8 BY 

WALTER TITTLE 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1919 



/ 



MOUMT PLEASANT BRANOh 



Copyright, 1917, 1918, by 
Charles Scribner's Sons 



Published September, 1918 
Reprinted November, December, 1918 



TRANSFER ^ 

Bb •• PUBLIC LIBlUJtY ^ 




^ 



\ 









483757.^ 

i 



V TO MY CHILDREN 

^ ELIZABETH, MEREDITH, AND LIONEL 

Y^ IN TOKEN OF MY AFFECTION 

'O^' AND WITH THE HOPE THAT THEY MAY BE FAITHFUL TO THE 

HIGHEST IDEALS OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP 



\ ............ 

T 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTBB 



PAQB 



I. The Folks and Their Folksiness .... 1 

II. Types and Diversions 39 

III. The Farmer of the Middle West ... 83 

IV. Chicago 135 

V. The Middle West in Politics 181 

VI. The Spirit of the West 235 



AUTHOR'S NOTE TO THE FOURTH 
EDITION 

In the reprintings of a book of this character 
it would be possible to revise and rewrite in 
such manner as to conceal the errors or mis- 
judgments of the author. It seems, however, 
more honest to permit these impressions to 
stand practically as they were written, with only 
a few minor corrections. It was my aim to 
make note of conditions, tendencies, and needs 
in the Valley of Democracy, and the conclusion 
of the war has affected my point of view with 
reference to these matters very little. 

The first months of the present year have been 
so crowded with incidents affecting the whole 
world that we recall with difficulty the events 
of only a few years ago. We have met repeated 
crises with an inspiring exhibition of unity and 
courage that should hearten us for the new tasks 
of readjustment that press for attention, and for 
the problems of self-government that are with- 
out end. I shall feel that these pages possess 
some degree of vitality if they quicken in the 

is 



X NOTE TO THE FOURTH EDITION 

mind and heart of the reader a hope and confi- 
dence that we of America do not walk bhndly, 
but follow a star that sheds upon us a perpet- 
ual light. 

M.N. 

Indianapolis, June 1, 1919. 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Michigan Avenue, Chicago, from the steps of the Art In- 
stitute Frontispiece 

FACING PAGK 

"Ten days of New York, and it's me for my home town" 6 

Art exhibits . . . now find a hearty welcome 20 

The Municipal Recreation Pier, Chicago 66 

Types and Diversions 74 

On a craft plying the waters of Erie I found all the condi- 
tions of a happy outing and types that it is always a 
joy to meet 78 

The Perry Monument at Put-in Bay 80 

A typical old homestead of the Middle West 100 

Students of agriculture in the pageant that celebrated the 
fortieth anniversary of the founding of Ohio State 
University 114 

A feeding-plant at "Whitehall," the farm of Edwin S. 

Kelly, near Sprmgfield, Ohio 120 

Judging graded shorthorn herds at the American Royal 

Live Stock Show in Kansas City 132 

Chicago is the big brother of all lesser towns 142 

The "Ham Fair" in Paris is richer in antiquarian loot, 

but Maxwell Street is enough; 'twill serve! 152 

si 



xii ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACraO PAGE 

Banquet given for the members of the National Institute 

of Arts and Letters 176 

There is a death-watch that occupies front seats at every 

political meeting 194 

The Political Barbecue 198 



THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 



France evoked from the unknown the valley that may, in more than 
one sense, be called the heart of America. . . . The chief significance 
and import of the addition of this valley to the maps of the world, all 
indeed that makes it significant, is that here was given (though not of 
deliberate intent) a rich, wide, untouched field, distant, accessible only 
to the hardiest, without a shadowing tradition or a restraining fence, in 
which men of all races were to make attempt to live together under 
rules of their own devising and enforcing. And as here the government 
of the people by the people was to have even more literal interpretation 
than in that Atlantic strip which had traditions of property suflFrage 
and church privilege and class distinctions, I have called it the " Valley 
<rf the New Democracy." 

— John H. Finlet: "The French in the Heart of America.'* 



THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

CHAPTER I 
THE FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 



THE great trouble with these fellows 
down here/' remarked my friend as 
we left the office of a New York 
banker — *'the trouble with all of 'em is that 
they forget about the Folks, You noticed that 
when he asked in his large, patronizing way 
how things are going out West he didn't wait 
for us to answer; he pressed a button and told 
his secretary to bring in those tables of railroad 
earnings and to-day's crop bulletins and that 
sort of rubbish, so he could tell us. It never 
occurs to 'em that the Folks are human beings 
and not just a column of statistics. Why, the 

Folks " 

My friend, an orator of distinction, formerly 
represented a tall-corn district in Congress. He 
drew me into Trinity churchyard and dis- 
coursed in a vein with which I had long been 

familiar upon a certain condescension in East- 

1 



2 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

erners, and the East's intolerable ignorance of 
the ways and manners, the hopes and aims, of 
the West, which move him to rage and despair. 
I was aware that he was gratified to have an 
opportunity to unbosom himself at the brazen 
gates of Wall Street, and equally conscious that 
he was experimenting upon me with phrases 
that he was coining for use on the hustings. 
They were so used, not without effect, in the 
campaign of 1916 — a contest whose results were 
well calculated to draw attention to the "Folks" 
as an upstanding, independent body of citizens. 
Folks is recognized by the lexicographers as 
an American colloquialism, a variant of folk. 
And folk, in old times, was used to signify the 
commonalty, the plain people. But my friend, 
as he rolled "Folks" under his tongue there in 
the shadow of Trinity, used it in a sense that 
excluded the hurrying midday Broadway throng 
and restricted its application to an infinitely 
superior breed of humanity, to be found on 
farms, in villages and cities remote from tide- 
water. His passion for democracy, his devotion 
to the commonweal, is not wasted upon New 
Englanders or Middle States people. In the 
South there are Folks, yes; his own people had 
come out of North Carolina, lingered a while in 
Kentucky, and lodged finally in Indiana, whence. 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 3 

following a common law of dispersion, they 
sought new homes in Illinois and Kansas. Be- 
yond the Rockies there are Folks; he meets 
their leaders in national conventions; but they 
are only second cousins of those valiant freemen 
who rallied to the call of Lincoln and followed 
Grant and Sherman into battles that shook the 
continent. My friend's point of view is held by 
great numbers of people in that region we now 
call the Middle West. This attitude or state of 
mind with regard to the East is not to be taken 
too seriously; it is a part of the national humor, 
and has been expressed with delightful vivacity 
and candor in Mr. William Allen White's re- 
freshing essay, "Emporia and New York." 

A definition of Folks as used all the way from 
Ohio to Colorado, and with particular point and 
pith by the haughty sons and daughters of In- 
diana and Kansas, may be set down thus: 

Folks, n. A superior people, derived largely from 
the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic races and domiciled in those 
northern States of the American Union whose waters fall 
into the Mississippi. Theiv folksiness (q. v.) is expressed 
in sturdy independence, hostility to capitalistic influence, 
and a proneness to social and political experiment. They 
are strong in the fundamental virtues, more or less sin- 
cerely averse to conventionality, and believe themselves 
possessed of a breadth of vision and a devotion to the 
common good at once beneficent and unique in the annals 
of mankind. 



4 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

We of the West do not believe — not really 
— that we are the only true interpreters of the 
dream of democracy. It pleases us to swagger 
a little when we speak of ourselves as the Folks 
and hint at the dire punishments we hold in 
store for monopoly and privilege; but we are 
far less dangerous than an outsider, bewildered 
or annoyed by our apparent bitterness, may be 
led to believe. In our hearts we do not think 
ourselves the only good Americans. We merely 
feel that the East began patronizing us and that 
anything we may do in that line has been forced 
upon us by years of outrageous contumely. 
And when New York went to bed on the night 
of election day, 1916, confident that as went 
the Empire State so went the Union, it was only 
that we of the West might chortle the next 
morning to find that Ah Sin had forty packs 
concealed in his sleeve and spread them out on 
the Sierra Nevadas with an air that was child- 
like and bland. 

Under all its jauntiness and cocksureness, 
the West is extremely sensitive to criticism. It 
likes admiration, and expects the Eastern visitor 
to be properly impressed by its achievements, 
its prodigious energy, its interpretation and 
practical application of democracy, and the 
earnestness with which it interests itself in the 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 5 

things of the spirit. Above all else it does not 
like to appear absurd. According to its light it 
intends to do the right thing, but it yields to 
laughter much more quickly than abuse if the 
means to that end are challenged. 

The pioneers of the older States endured hard- 
ships quite as great as the Middle Westerners; 
they have contributed as generously to the na- 
tional life in war and peace; the East's aid to 
the West, in innumerable ways, is immeasur- 
able. I am not thinking of farm mortgages, but 
of nobler things — of men and women who car- 
ried ideals of life and conduct, of justice and 
law, into new territory where such matters were 
often lightly valued. The prowler in these 
Western States recognizes constantly the trail 
of New Englanders who founded towns, built 
schools, colleges, and churches, and left an in- 
effaceable stamp upon communities. Many of 
us Westerners sincerely admire the East and do 
reverence to Eastern gods when we can sneak 
unobserved into the temples. We dispose of 
our crops and merchandise as quickly as possi- 
ble, that we may be seen of men in New York. 
Western school-teachers pour into New England 
every summer on pious pilgrimages to Concord 
and Lexington. And yet we feel ourselves, the 
great body of us, a peculiar people. "Ten days 



6 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

of New York, and it's me for my home town'* 
in Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, or Colorado. This 
expresses a very general feeling in the provinces. 

It is far from my purpose to make out a case 
for the West as the true home of the Folks in 
these newer connotations of that noun, but 
rather to record some of the phenomena observ- 
able in those commonwealths where we are 
assured the Folks maintain the only true ark 
of the covenant of democracy. Certain con- 
cessions may be assumed in the unconvinced 
spectator whose path lies in less favored por- 
tions of the nation. The West does indubitably 
coax an enormous treasure out of its soil to be 
tossed into the national hopper, and it does exert 
a profound influence upon the national life; but 
its manner of thought is different: it arrives at 
conclusions by processes that strike the Eastern 
mind as illogical and often as absurd or danger- 
ous. The two great mountain ranges are bar- 
riers that shut it in a good deal by itself in spite 
of every facility of communication; it is dis- 
posed to be scornful of the world's experience 
where the experience is not a part of its own 
history. It believes that forty years of Illinois 
or Wisconsin are better than a cycle of Cathay, 
and it is prepared to prove it 

The West's philosophy is a compound of 




'Ten days of New York, and it's me for my home tow-n." 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 7 

Franklin and Emerson, with a dash of Whit- 
man. Even Washington is a pale figure behind 
the Lincoln of its own prairies. Its curiosity is 
insatiable; its mind is speculative; it has a su- 
preme confidence that upon an agreed state of 
facts the Folks, sitting as a high court, will hand 
down to the nation a true and just decision upon 
any matter in controversy. It is a patient lis- 
tener. Seemingly tolerant of false prophets, it 
amiably gives them hearing in thousands of 
forums while awaiting an opportunity to smother 
their ambitions on election day. It will not, if 
it knows itself, do anything supremely foolish. 
Flirting with Greenbackism and Free Silver, it 
encourages the assiduous wooers shamelessly and 
then calmly sends them about their business. 
Maine can approach her election booths as coyly 
as Ohio or Nebraska, and yet the younger States 
rejoice in the knowledge that after all nothing is 
decided until they have been heard from. Poli- 
tics becomes, therefore, not merely a matter for 
concern when some great contest is forward, 
but the year round it crowds business hard for 
first place in public aflFection. 



8 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

II 

The people of the Valley of Democracy (I am 
indebted for this phrase to Dr. John H. Finley) 
do a great deal of thinking and talking; they 
brood over the world's affairs with a peculiar 
intensity; and, beyond question, they exchange 
opinions with a greater freedom than their fel- 
low citizens in other parts of America. I have 
travelled between Boston and New York on 
many occasions and have covered most of New 
England in railway journeys without ever being 
addressed by a stranger; but seemingly in the 
West men travel merely to cultivate the art of 
conversation. The gentleman who borrows your 
newspaper returns it with a crisp comment on 
the day's events. He is from Beatrice, or Fort 
Collins, perhaps, and you quickly find that he 
lives next door to the only man you know in his 
home town. You praise Nebraska, and he meets 
you in a generous spirit of reciprocity and com- 
pliments Iowa, Minnesota, or any other com- 
monwealth you may honor with your citizen- 
ship. 

The West is proud of its talkers, and is at 
pains to produce them for the edification of the 
visitor. In Kansas a little while ago my host 
summoned a friend of his from a town eighty 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 9 

miles away that I might hear him talk. And it 
was well worth my while to hear that gentle- 
man talk; he is the best talker I have ever 
heard. He described for me great numbers of 
politicians past and present, limning them with 
the merciless stroke of a skilled caricaturist, or, 
in a benignant mood, presented them in inef- 
faceable miniature. He knew Kansas as he 
knew his own front yard. It was a delight to 
listen to discourse so free, so graphic in its char- 
acterizations, so colored and flavored with the 
very soil. Without impropriety I may state 
that this gentleman is Mr. Henry J. Allen, of 
the Wichita Beacon; the friend who produced 
him for my instruction and entertainment is 
Mr. William Allen White of the Emporia 
Gazette. Since this meeting I have heard Mr. 
Allen talk on other occasions without any feel- 
ing that I should modify my estimate of his 
conversational powers. In his most satisfying 
narrative, *'The Martial Adventures of Henry 
and Me," Mr. White has told how he and 
Mr. Allen, as agents of the Red Cross, bore the 
good news of the patriotism and sympathy of 
Kansas to England, France, and Italy, and cer- 
tainly America could have sent no more heart- 
ening messengers to our allies. 

I know of no Western town so small that it 



10 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

doesn't boast at least one wit or story-teller 
who is exhibited as a special mark of honor for 
the entertainment of guests. As often as not 
these stars are women, w^ho discuss public mat- 
ters with understanding and brilliancy. The 
old superstition that women are deficient in 
humor never struck me as applicable to Ameri- 
can women anywhere; certainly it is not true of 
Western women. In a region where story-tell- 
ing flourishes, I can match the best male anec- 
dotalist with a woman who can evoke mirth by 
neater and defter means. 

The Western State is not only a political but 
a social unit. It is like a club, where every one 
is presumably acquainted with every one else. 
The railroads and interurbans carry an enor- 
mous number of passengers who are solely upon 
pleasure bent. The observer is struck by the 
general sociability, the astonishing amount of 
visiting that is in progress. In smoking com- 
partments and in day coaches any one who is 
at all folksy may hear talk that is likely to prove 
informing and stimulating. And this cheeriness 
and volubility of the people one meets greatly 
enhances the pleasure of travel. Here one is re- 
minded constantly of the provincial confidence 
in the West's greatness and wisdom in every 
department of human endeavor. 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 11 

In January of last year it was my privilege to 
share with seven other passengers the smoking- 
room of a train out of Denver for Kansas City. 
The conversation was opened by a vigorous, 
elderly gentleman who had, he casually re- 
marked, crossed Kansas six times in a wagon. 
He was a native of Illinois, a graduate of As- 
bury (Depauw) College, Indiana, a Civil War 
veteran, and he had been a member of the Mis- 
souri Legislature. He lived on a ranch in Colo- 
rado, but owned a farm in Kansas and was 
hastening thither to test his acres for oil. The 
range of his adventures was amazing; his ac- 
quaintance embraced men of all sorts and con- 
ditions, including Buffalo Bill, whose funeral he 
had just attended in Denver. He had known 
General George A. Custer and gave us the true 
story of the massacre of that hero and his com- 
mand on the Little Big Horn. He described 
the "bad men" of the old days, many of whom 
had honored him with their friendship. At least 
three of the company had enjoyed like experi- 
ences and verified or amplified his statements. 
This gentleman remarked with undisguised sat- 
isfaction that he had not been east of the Mis- 
sissippi for thirty years ! 

I fancied that he acquired merit with all the 
trans-Mississippians present by this declaration. 



12 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

However, a young commercial traveller who had 
allowed it to become known that he lived in 
New York seemed surprised, if not pained, by 
the revelation. As we were passing from one 
dry State to another we fell naturally into a dis- 
cussion of prohibition as a moral and economic 
factor. The drummer testified to its beneficent 
results in arid territory with which he was fa- 
miliar; one effect had been increased orders from 
his Colorado customers. It was apparent that 
his hearers listened with approval; they were 
citizens of dry States and it tickled their sense 
of their own rectitude that a pilgrim from the 
remote East should speak favorably of their 
handiwork. But the young gentleman, warmed 
by the atmosphere of friendliness created by his 
remarks, was guilty of a grave error of judg- 
ment. 

"It's all right for these Western towns," he 
said, **but you could never put it over in New 
York. New York will never stand for it. Lon- 
don, Paris, New York — there's only one New 
York!" 

The deep sigh with which he concluded, ex- 
pressive of the most intense loyalty, the most 
poignant homesickness, and perhaps a thirst of 
long accumulation, caused six cigars, firmly set 
in six pairs of jaws, to point disdainfully at the 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 13 

ceiling. No one spoke until the offender had 
betaken himself humbly to bed. The silence 
was eloquent of pity for one so abandoned. 
That any one privileged to range the cities of the 
West should, there at the edge of the great plain, 
set New York apart for adoration, was too im- 
pious, too monstrous, for verbal condemnation. 
Young women seem everywhere to be in mo- 
tion in the West, going home from schools, col- 
leges, or the State universities for week-ends, or 
attending social functions in neighboring towns. 
Last fall I came down from Green Bay in a train 
that was becalmed for several hours at Manito- 
woc. I left the crowded day coach to explore 
that pleasing haven and, returning, found that 
my seat had been pre-empted by a very charming 
young person who was reading my magazine 
with the greatest absorption. We agreed that 
the seat offered ample space for two and that 
there was no reason in equity or morals why 
she should not finish the story she had begun. 
This done, she commented upon it frankly and 
soundly and proceeded to a brisk discussion of 
literature in general. Her range of reading had 
been wide — indeed, I was embarrassed by its 
extent and impressed by the shrewdness of her 
literary appraisements. She was bound for a 
normal school where she was receiving instruc- 



14 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

tion, not for the purpose of entering into the 
pedagogical life immediately, but to obtain a 
teacher's license against a time when it might 
become necessary for her to earn a livelihood. 
Every girl, she believed, should fit herself for 
some employment. 

Manifestly she was not a person to ask favors 
of destiny: at eighteen she had already made 
terms with life and tossed the contract upon the 
knees of the gods. The normal school did not 
require her presence until the day after to-mor- 
row, and she was leaving the train at the end of 
an hour to visit a friend who had arranged a 
dance in her honor. If that species of enter- 
tainment interested me, she said, I might stop 
for the dance. Engagements farther down the 
line precluded the possibility of my accepting 
this invitation, which was extended with the ut- 
most circumspection, as though she were oflFer- 
ing an impersonal hospitality supported by the 
sovereign dignity of the commonwealth of Wis- 
consin. When the train slowed down at her 
station a commotion on the platform announced 
the presence of a reception committee of con- 
siderable magnitude, from which I inferred that 
her advent was an incident of importance to the 
community. As she bade me good-by she tore 
apart a bouquet of fall flowers she had been 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 15 

carrying, handed me half of them, and passed 
from my sight forever. My exalted opinion of 
the young women of Wisconsin was strength- 
ened on another occasion by a chance meeting 
with two graduates of the State University who 
were my fellow voyagers on a steamer that 
bumped into a riotous hurricane on its way 
down Lake Michigan. On the slanting deck 
they discoursed of pohtical economy with a zest 
and humor that greatly enlivened my respect 
for the dismal science. 

The listener in the West accumulates data 
touching the tastes and ambitions of the people 
of which local guide-books offer no hint. A lit- 
tle while ago two ladies behind me in a Minne- 
apolis street-car discussed Cardinal Newman's 
"Dream of Gerontius," with as much avidity as 
though it were the newest novel. Having found 
that the apostles of free verse had captured and 
fortified Denver and Omaha, it was a relief to 
encounter these Victorian pickets on the upper 
waters of the Mississippi. 

Ill 

One is struck by the remarkable individuality 
of the States, towns, and cities of the West. 
State boundaries are not merely a geographical 



16 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

expression: they mark real difiPerences of opinion, 
habit, custom, and taste. This is not a senti- 
mental idea; any one may prove it for himself 
by crossing from Illinois into Wisconsin, or from 
Iowa into Nebraska. Kansas and Nebraska, 
though cut out of the same piece, not only seem 
different but they are different. Interest in 
local differentiations, in shadings of the "color'* 
derived from a common soil, keep the visitor 
alert. To be sure the Ladies of the Lakes — 
Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, To- 
ledo, Duluth — have physical aspects in com- 
mon, but the similarity ends there. The litera- 
ture of chambers of commerce as to the num- 
ber of freight-cars handled or increases of popu- 
lation are of no assistance in a search for the 
causes of diversities in aim, spirit, and achieve- 
ment. 

The alert young cities watch each other 
enviously — they are enormously proud and 
anxious not to be outbettered in the struggle for 
perfection. In many places one is conscious of 
an effective leadership, of a man or a group of 
men and women who plant a target and rally 
the citizenry to play for the bull's-eye. A con- 
spicuous instance of successful individual leader- 
ship is offered by Kansas City, where Mr. Wil- 
liam R. Nelson, backed by his admirable news- 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 17 

paper, The Star, fought to the end of his life to 
make his city a better place to live in. Mr. 
Nelson was a remarkably independent and cou- 
rageous spirit, his journalistic ideals were the 
highest, and he was deeply concerned for the 
public welfare, not only in the more obvious 
sense, but equally in bringing within the com- 
mon reach enlightening influences that are likely 
to be neglected in new communities. Kansas 
City not only profited by Mr. Nelson's wisdom 
and generosity in his lifetime, but the commu- 
nity will receive ultimately his entire fortune. I 
am precluded from citing in other cities men 
still living who are distinguished by a like devo- 
tion to public service, but I have chosen Mr. 
Nelson as an eminent example of the force that 
may be wielded by a single citizen. 

Minneapolis offers a happy refutation of a 
well-established notion that a second generation 
is prone to show a weakened fibre. The sons 
of the men who fashioned this vigorous city 
have intelligently and generously supported 
many undertakings of highest value. The Min- 
neapolis art museum and school and an orches- 
tra of widening reputation present eloquent tes- 
timony to the city's attitude toward those things 
that are more excellent. Contrary to the usual 
history, these were not won as the result of la- 



18 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

borious effort but rose spontaneously. The pub- 
lic library of this city not only serves the hurried 
business man through a branch in the business 
district, equipped with industrial and commer- 
cial reference books, but keeps pace with the 
local development in art and music by assem- 
bling the best literature in these departments. 
Both Minneapolis and Kansas City are well ad- 
vertised by their admirably managed, progres- 
sive libraries. More may be learned from a 
librarian as to the trend of thought in his com- 
munity than from the secretary of a commercial 
body. It is significant that last year, when mu- 
nicipal affairs were much to the fore in Kansas 
City, there was a marked increase in the use of 
books on civic and kindred questions. The lat- 
est report of the librarian recites that "as the 
library more nearly meets the wants of the com- 
munity, the proportion of fiction used grows 
less, being but 34 per cent of the whole issue for 
the year." Similar impulses and achievements 
are manifested in Cleveland, a city that has 
written many instructive chapters in the history 
of municipal government. Since her exposition 
of 1904 and the splendid pageant of 1914 crys- 
tallized public aspiration, St. Louis has experi- 
enced a new birth of civic pride. Throughout 
the West American art has found cordial sup* 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 19 

port. In Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Cincin- 
nati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Chicago, Minneap- 
olis, Omaha, and Kansas City there are note- 
worthy specimens of the best work of American 
painters. The art schools connected with the 
Western museums have exercised a salutary in- 
fluence in encouraging local talent, not only in 
landscape and portraiture, but in industrial de- 
signing. 

By friendly co-operation on the part of 
Chicago and St. Louis smaller cities are able 
to enjoy advantages that would otherwise be 
beyond their reach. Lectures, orchestras, and 
travelling art exhibits that formerly stopped at 
Chicago or jumped thence to California, now 
find a hearty welcome in Kansas City, Omaha, 
and Denver. Thus Indianapolis was among the 
few cities that shared a few years ago in the 
comprehensive presentation of Saint-Gaudens's 
work. The expense of the undertaking was not 
inconsiderable, but merchants and manufactur- 
ers bought tickets for distribution among their 
employees and met the demand with a generos^ 
ity that left a balance in the art association's 
treasury. These Western cities, with their po- 
litical and social problems, their rough edges, 
smoke, and impudent intrusions of tracks and 
chimneys due to rapid development and pJie- 



20 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

nomenal prosperity, present art literally as the 
handmaiden of industry — 

"All-lovdy Art, stem Labor's fair-haired child." 

If any one thing is quite definitely settled 
throughout this territory it is that yesterday's 
leaves have been plucked from the calendar: 
this verily is the land of to-morrow. One does 
not stand beside the Missouri at Omaha and 
indulge long in meditations upon the turbulent 
history and waywardness of that tawny stream; 
the cattle receipts for the day may have broken 
all records, but there are schools that must be 
seen, a collection of pictures to visit, or lectures 
to attend. I unhesitatingly pronounce Omaha 
the lecture centre of the world — reception 
committees flutter at the arrival of all trains. 
Man does not live by bread alone — not 
even in the heart of the corn belt in a city that 
haughtily proclaims itself the largest primary 
butter-market in the world ! It is the great 
concern of Kansas that it shall miss nothing; 
to cross that commonwealth is to gain the im- 
pression that politics and corn are hard pressed 
as its main industries by the cultural mecha- 
nisms that produce sweetness and light. Iowa 
goes to bed early but not before it has read an 
improving book ! 




Art exhibits . . . now find a hearty welcome. 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 21 

In those Western States where women have 
assumed the burden of citizenship they seem 
to lose none of their zeal for art, literature, and 
music. Equal suffrage was established in Colo- 
rado in 1893, and the passing pilgrim cannot fail 
to be struck by the lack of self -consciousness with 
which the women of that State discuss social 
and political questions. The Western woman is 
animated by a divine energy and she is dis- 
tinguished by her willingness to render public 
service. What man neglects or ignores she 
cheerfully undertakes, and she has so culti- 
vated the gentle art of persuasion that the mas- 
culine check-book opens readily to her demand 
for assistance in her pet causes. 

It must not be assumed that in this land of 
pancakes and panaceas interest in "culture" 
is new or that its manifestations are sporadic 
or ill-directed. The early comers brought with 
them suflBcient cultivation to leaven the lump, 
and the educational forces and cultural move- 
ments now everywhere marked in Western 
communities are but the fruition of the labors 
of the pioneers who bore books of worth and 
a love of learning with them into the wilderness. 
Much sound reading was done in log cabins 
when the school-teacher was still a rarity, and 
amid the strenuous labors of the earliest days 



22 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

many sought self-expression in various kinds 
of writing. Along the Ohio there were bards 
in abundance, and a decade before the Civil 
War Cincinnati had honest claims to being a 
literary centre. The numerous poets of those 
days — Coggeshall's "Poets and Poetry of the 
West," published in 1866, mentions one hundred 
and fifty-two! — were chiefly distinguished by 
their indifference to the life that lay nearest 
them. Sentiment and sentimentalism flourished 
at a time when life was a hard business, though 
Edward Eggleston is entitled to consideration 
as an early realist, by reason of ''The Hoosier 
Schoolmaster," which, in spite of Indiana's 
repudiation of it as false and defamatory, really 
contains a true picture of conditions with which 
Eggleston was thoroughly familiar. There fol- 
lowed later E. W. Howe's "The Story of a 
Country Town" and Hamlin Garland's "Main 
Travelled Roads," which are landmarks of 
realism firmly planted in territory invaded later 
by Romance, bearing the blithe flag of Zenda. 

It is not surprising that the Mississippi valley 
should prove far more responsive to the chimes 
of romance than to the harsh clang of realism. 
The West in itself is a romance. Virginia's 
claims to recognition as the chief field of tourney 
for romance in America totter before the his- 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 23 

tory of a vast area whose soberest chronicles 
are enhvened by the most inthralUng adven- 
tures and a long succession of picturesque char- 
acters. The French voyageur, on his way from 
Canada by lake and river to clasp hands with 
his kinsmen of the lower Mississippi; the Amer- 
ican pioneers, with their own heroes — George 
Rogers Clark, "'Mad Anthony" Wayne, and 
*' Tippecanoe" Harrison; the soldiers of Indian 
wars and their sons who fought in Mexico in 
the forties; the men who donned the blue in the 
sixties; the Knights of the Golden Circle, who 
kept the war governors anxious in the border 
States — these are all disclosed upon a tapestry 
crowded with romantic strife and stress. 

The earliest pioneers, enjoying little inter- 
course with their fellows, had time to fashion 
many a tale of personal adventure against the 
coming of a visitor, or for recital on court days, 
at political meetings, or at the prolonged "camp 
meetings," where questions of religion were 
debated. They cultivated unconsciously the 
art of telling their stories well. The habit of 
story-telling grew into a social accomplishment 
and it was by a natural transition that here 
and there some one began to set down his tales 
on paper. Thus General Lew Wallace, who 
lived in the day of great story-tellers, wrote 



24 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

"The Fair God," a romance of the coming of 
Cortez to Mexico, and followed it with "Ben 
Hur," one of the most popular romances ever 
written. Crawfordsville, the Hoosier county- 
seat where General Wallace lived, was once 
visited and its romanticism menaced by Mr. 
Howells, who sought local color for the court 
scene in "A Modern Instance," his novel of 
divorce. Indiana was then a place where legal 
separations were obtainable by convenient proc- 
esses relinquished later to Nevada. 

Maurice Thompson and his brother Will, 
who wrote "The High Tide at Gettysburg," 
sent out from Crawfordsville the poems and 
sketches that made archery a popular amuse- 
ment in the seventies. The Thompsons, both 
practising lawyers, employed their leisure in 
writing and in hunting with the bow and arrow. 
"The Witchery of Archery" and "Songs of 
Fair Weather" still retain their pristine charm. 
That two young men in an Indiana country 
town should deliberately elect to live in the 
days of the Plantagenets speaks for the ro- 
mantic atmosphere of the Hoosier common- 
wealth. A few miles away James Whitcomb 
Riley had already begun to experiment with a 
lyre of a different sort, and quickly won for 
himself a place in popular affection shared only 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 25 

among American poets by Longfellow. Almost 
coincident with his passing rose Edgar Lee 
Masters, with the "Spoon River Anthology," 
and Vachel Lindsay, a poet hardly less distin- 
guished for penetration and sincerity, to chant 
of Illinois in the key of realism. John G. Nie- 
hardt has answered their signals from Nebraska's 
com lands. Nor shall I omit from the briefest 
list the "Chicago Poems" of Carl Sandburg. 
The "wind stacker" and the tractor are dan- 
gerous engines for Romance to charge: I should 
want Mr. Booth Tarkington to umpire so mo- 
mentous a contest. Mr. Tarkington flirts 
shamelessly with realism and has shown in 
"The Turmoil" that he can slip overalls and 
jumper over the sword and ruffles of Beaucaire 
and make himself a knight of industry. Like- 
wise, in Chicago, Mr. Henry B. Fuller has posted 
the Chevalier Pensieri-Vani on the steps of the 
board of trade, merely, we may assume, to 
collect material for realistic fiction. The West 
has proved that it is not afraid of its own shadow 
in the adumbrations of Mrs. Mary A. Watts, 
Mr. Robert Herrick, Miss Willa Sibert Cather, 
Mr. William Allen White, and Mr. Brand Whit- 
lock, all novelists of insight, force, and author- 
ity; nor may we forget that impressive tale of 
Chicago, Frank Norris's "The Pit," a work 



26 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

that gains in dignity and significance with the 
years. 

Education in all the Western States has not 
merely performed its traditional functions, but 
has become a distinct social and economic force. 
It is a far cry from the day of the three R's and 
the dictum that the State's duty to the young 
ends when it has eliminated them from the 
illiteracy columns of the census to the State 
universities and agricultural colleges, with their 
broad curricula and extension courses, and the 
free kindergartens, the manual-training high 
schools, and vocational institutions that are so- 
cializing and democratizing education. 



IV 



In every town of the great Valley there are 
groups of people earnestly engaged in deter- 
mined efforts to solve governmental problems. 
These efforts frequently broaden into *' move- 
ments" that succeed. We witness here con- 
stant battles for reform that are often won only 
to be lost again. The bosses, driven out at 
one point, immediately rally and fortify an- 
other. Nothing, however, is pleasanter to 
record than the fact that the war upon vicious 
or stupid local government goes steadily on 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 27 

and that throughout the field under scrutiny- 
there have been within a decade marked and 
encouraging gains. The many experiments 
making with administrative devices are rapidly 
developing a mass of valuable data. The very 
lack of uniformity in these movements adds to 
their interest; in countless communities the 
attention is arrested by something well done 
that invites emulation. Constant scandals in 
municipal administration, due to incompetence, 
waste, and graft, are slowly penetrating to the 
consciousness of the apathetic citizen, and sen- 
timent favorable to the abandonment of the 
old system of partisan local government has 
grown with remarkable rapidity. The absolute 
divorcement of municipalities from State and 
national politics is essential to the conduct of 
city government on business principles. This 
statement is made with the more confidence 
from the fact that it is reinforced by a creditable 
literature on the subject, illustrated by count- 
less surveys of boss-ridden cities where there is 
determined protest against government by the 
unfit. That cities shall be conducted as stock 
companies with reference solely to the rights 
and needs of the citizen, without regard to 
party politics, is the demand in so many quar- 
ters that the next decade is bound to witness 



28 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

striking transformations in this field. Last 
March Kansas City lost a splendidly conducted 
fight for a new charter that embraced the city- 
manager plan. Here, however, was a defeat 
with honor, for the results proved so conclusively 
the contention of the reformers, that the bosses 
rule, that the effort was not wasted. In Chicago, 
Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Minneapolis, the 
leaven is at work, and the bosses with grati- 
fying density are aiding the cause by their hos- 
tility and their constant illustration of the evils 
of the antiquated system they foster. 

The elimination of the saloon in States that 
have already adopted prohibition promises polit- 
ical changes of the utmost importance in mu- 
nicipal affairs. The saloon is the most familiar 
and the most mischievous of all the outposts 
and rallying centres of political venality. Here 
the political "organization" maintains its faith- 
ful sentinels throughout the year; the good 
citizen, intent upon his lawful business and 
interested in politics only when election day 
approaches, is usually unaware that hundreds of 
barroom loafers are constantly plotting against 
him. The mounting *'dry wave" is attributable 
quite as much to revolt against the saloon as 
the most formidable of political units as to a 
moral detestation of alcohol. Economic con- 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 29 

siderations also have entered very deeply into 
the movement, and prohibition advocated as a 
war measure developed still another phase. 
The liquor interests provoked and invited the 
drastic legislation that has overwhelmed their 
traffic and made dry territory of a large area 
of the West. By defying regulatory laws and 
maintaining lobbies in legislatures, by cracking 
the whip over candidates and office-holders, 
they made of themselves an intolerable nui- 
sance. Indiana's adoption of prohibition was 
very largely due to antagonism aroused by the 
liquor interests through their political activities 
covering half a century. The frantic efforts of 
breweries and distilleries there and in many 
other States to persuade saloon-keepers to obey 
the laws in the hope of spiking the guns of the 
opposition came too late. The liquor interests 
had counselled and encouraged lawlessness too 
long and found the retailer spoiled by the im- 
munity their old political power had gained for 
him. 

A sweeping Federal law abolishing the traffic 
may be enacted while these pages are on the 
press.* Without such a measure wet and dry 
forces will continue to battle; territory that is 
only partly dry will continue its struggle for 
bone-dry laws, and States that roped and tied 

* The matter has been disposed of by the adoption of a prohibition 
amendment to the Federal Constitution. 

^ 



30 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

John Barleycorn must resist attempts to put 
him on his feet again. There is, however, 
nothing to encourage the idea that the strongly 
developed sentiment against the saloon will lose 
its potency; and it is hardly conceivable that 
any political party in a dry State will write a 
wet plank into its platform, though stranger 
things have happened. Men who, in Colorado 
for example, were bitterly hostile to prohibition 
confess that the results convince them of its 
eflScacy. The Indiana law became effective last 
April, and in June the workhouse at Indianapolis 
was closed permanently, for the interesting rea- 
son that the number of police-court prisoners 
was so reduced as to make the institution un- 
necessary. 

The economic shock caused by the prostra- 
tion of this long-established business is absorbed 
much more readily than might be imagined. 
Compared with other forms of manufacturing, 
brewing and distilling have been enormously 
profitable, and the operators have usually taken 
care of themselves in advance of the destruc- 
tion of their business. I passed a brewery near 
Denver that had turned its attention to the 
making of "near" beer and malted milk, and 
employed a part of its labor otherwise in the 
manufacture of pottery. The presence of a 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 31 

herd of cows on the brewery property to supply 
milk, for combination with malt, nuarked, with 
what struck me as the pleasantest of ironies, a 
cheerful acquiescence in the new order. Den- 
ver property rented formerly to saloon-keepers 
I found pretty generally occupied by shops of 
other kinds. In one window was this alluring 
sign: 

Buy Your Shoes 
Where You Bought Your Booze 



The West's general interest in public affairs is 
not remarkable when we consider the history of 
the Valley. The pioneers who crossed the AUe- 
ghanies with rifle and axe were peculiarly jealous 
of their rights and liberties. They viewed every 
political measure in the light of its direct, con- 
crete bearing upon themselves. They risked 
much to build homes and erect States in the 
wilderness and they insisted, not unreasonably, 
that the government should not forget them in 
their exile. Poverty enforced a strict watch 
upon public expenditures, and their personal 
security entered largely into their attitude to- 
ward the nation. Their own imperative needs, 
the thinly distributed population, apprehensions 



32 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

created by the menace of Indians, stubbornly 
hostile to the white man's encroachments — all 
contributed to a certain selfishness in the set- 
tlers' point of view, and they welcomed political 
leaders who advocated measures that promised 
relief and protection. As they listened to the 
pleas of candidates from the stump (a rostrum 
fashioned by their own axes!) they were in- 
tensely critical. Moreover, the candidate him- 
self was subjected to searching scrutiny. Gov- 
ernment, to these men of faith and hardihood, 
was a very personal thing: the leaders they 
chose to represent them were in the strictest 
sense their representatives and agents, whom 
they retired on very slight provocation. 

The sharp projection of the extension of 
slavery as an issue served to awaken and crys- 
tallize national feeling. Education, internal 
improvements to the accompaniment of wild- 
cat finance, reforms in State and county govern- 
ments, all yielded before the greater issue. The 
promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of hap- 
piness had led the venturous husbandmen into 
woods and prairies, and they viewed with ab- 
horrence the idea that one man might own an- 
other and enjoy the fruits of his labor. Lincoln 
was not more the protagonist of a great cause 
than the personal spokesman of a body of free- 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 33 

men who were attracted to his standard by the 
facts of his history that so largely paralleled 
their own. 

It is not too much to say that Lincoln and 
the struggle of which he was the leader roused 
the Middle West to its first experience of a 
national consciousness. The provincial spirit 
vanished in an hour before the beat of drums 
under the elms and maples of court-house yards. 
The successful termination of the war left the 
West the possessor of a new influence in national 
affairs. It had not only thrown into the con- 
flict its full share of armed strength but had 
sent Grant, Sherman, and many military stars 
of lesser magnitude flashing into the firmament. 
The West was thenceforth to be reckoned with 
in all political speculations. Lincoln was the 
precursor of a line of Presidents all of whom 
were soldiers: Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, 
McKinley ; and there was no marked disturbance 
in the old order until Mr. Cleveland's advent in 
1884, with a resulting flare of independence not 
wholly revealed in the elections following his 
three campaigns. 

My concern here is not with partisan matters, 
nor even with those internal upheavals that in 
the past have caused so much heartache to the 
shepherds of both of the major political flocks. 



34 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

With only the greatest deUcacy may one refer 
to the Democratic schism of 1896 or to the 
break in the RepubHcan ranks of 1912. But 
the purposes and aims of the Folks with respect 
to government are of national importance. 
The Folks are not at all disposed to relinquish 
the power in national affairs which they have 
wielded with growing effectiveness. No matter 
whether they are right or wrong in their judg- 
ments, they are far from being a negligible force, 
and forecasters of nominees and policies for 
the future do well to give heed to them. 

The trend toward social democracy, with 
its accompanying eagerness to experiment with 
new devices for confiding to the people the power 
of initiating legislation and expelling unsatis- 
factory officials, paralleled by another tendency 
toward the short ballot and the concentration 
of power — these and kindred tendencies are 
viewed best in a non-partisan spirit in those 
free Western airs where the electorate is fickle, 
coy, and hard to please. A good deal of what 
was called populism twenty years ago, and as- 
sociated in the minds of the contumelious with 
long hair and whiskers, was advocated in 1912 
by gentlemen who called themselves Progres- 
sives and were on good terms with the barber. 
In the Progressive convention of 1916 I was 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 35 

struck by the great number of Phi Beta Kappa 
keys worn by delegates and sympathetic spec- 
tators. If they were cranks they were educated 
cranks, who could not be accused of ignorance 
of the teachings of experience in their political 
cogitations. They were presumably acquainted 
with the history of republics from the begin- 
ning of time, and the philosophy to be deduced 
from their disasters. It was because the Pro- 
gressive party enlisted so many very capable 
politicians familiar with organization methods 
that it became a formidable rival of the old 
parties in 1912. In 1916 it lost most of these 
supporters, who saw hope of Republican suc- 
cess and were anxious to ride on the band-wagon. 
Nothing, however, could be more reassuring 
than the confidence in the people, i. e., the Folks 
manifested by men and women who know their 
Plato and are familiar with Isaiah's distrust of 
the crowd and his reliance upon the remnant. 

The isolation of the independent who be- 
longs to no organization and is unaware of the 
number of voters who share his sentiments, 
militates against his effectiveness as a protest- 
ing factor. He waits timidly in the dark for 
a flash that will guide him toward some more 
courageous brother. The American is the most 
self-conscious being on earth and he is loath 



36 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

to set himself apart to be pointed out as a crank, 
for in partisan camps all recalcitrants are viewed 
contemptuously as erratic and dangerous per- 
sons. It has been demonstrated that a com- 
paratively small number of voters in half a 
dozen Western States, acting together, can 
throw a weight into the scale that will defeat 
one or the other of the chief candidates for the 
presidency. If they should content themselves 
with an organization and, without nominating 
candidates, menace either side that aroused 
their hostility, their effectiveness would be in- 
creased. But here again we encounter that 
peculiarity of the American that he likes a crowd. 
He is so used to the spectacular demonstrations 
of great campaigns, and so enjoys the thunder 
of the captains and the shouting, that he is 
overcome by loneliness when he finds himself 
at small conferences that plot the overthrow 
of the party of his former allegiance. 

The West may be likened to a naughty boy 
in a hickory shirt and overalls who enjoys pulling 
the chair from under his knickerbockered, Eton- 
collared Eastern cousins. The West creates a 
new issue whenever it pleases, and wearying of 
one plaything cheerfully seeks another. It 
accepts the defeat of free silver and turns joy- 
fully to prohibition, flattering itself that its chief 



FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS 37 

concern is with moral issues. It wants to make 
the world a better place to live in and it be- 
lieves in abundant legislation to that end. It 
experiments by States, points with pride to 
the results, and seeks to confer the priceless 
boon upon the nation. Much of its lawmaking 
is shocking to Eastern conservatism, but no 
inconsiderable number of Easterners hear the 
window-smashing and are eager to try it at 
home. 

To spank the West and send it supperless 
to bed is a very large order, but I have con- 
versed with gentlemen on the Eastern seaboard 
who feel that this should be done. They go 
the length of saying that if this chastisement is 
neglected the republic will perish. Of course, 
the West doesn't want the republic to perish; it 
honestly believes itself preordained of all time 
to preserve the repubhc. It sits up o' nights 
to consider ways and means of insuring its 
preservation. It is very serious and doesn't at 
all like being chaffed about its hatred of Wall 
Street and its anxiety to pin annoying tick- 
tacks on the windows of ruthless corporations. 
It is going to get everything for the Folks that 
it can, and it sees nothing improper in the idea 
of State-owned elevators or of fixing by law 
the height of the heels on the slippers of its 



38 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

emancipated women. It is in keeping with 
the cheery contentment of the West that it 
beheves that it has "at home" or can summon 
to its R. F. D. box everything essential to hu- 
man happiness. 

Across this picture of ease, contentment, and 
complacency fell the cloud of war. What I am 
attempting is a record of transition, and I have 
set down the foregoing with a consciousness 
that our recent yesterdays already seem remote; 
that many things that were true only a few 
months ago are now less true, though it is none 
the less important that we remember them. It 
is my hope that what I shall say of that period 
to which we are even now referring as *' before 
the war " may serve to emphasize the sharpness 
of America's new confrontations and the yield- 
ing, for a time at least, of the pride of section- 
alism to the higher demands of nationality. 



CHAPTER II 
TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 

'O I see flashing that this America is only you and me. 
Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me. 
Its crimes, lies, thefts, defections, are you and me. 
Its Congress is you and me, the officers, capitols, armies, 

ships, are you and me. 
Its endless gestations of new States are you and me. 
The war (that war so bloody and grim, the war I will 

henceforth forget), was you and me. 
Natural and artificial are you and me, 
Freedom, language, poems, employments, are you and 

me. 
Past, present, future, are you and me." 

Whitman. 



AT the end of a week spent in a Middle 
/"% Western city a visitor from the East 
inquired wearily: "Does no one work 
in this town.^" The answer to such a question 
is that of course everybody works; the town 
boasts no man of leisure; but on occasions the 
citizens play, and the advent of any properly 
certified guest affords a capital excuse for a 
period of intensified sociability. "Welcome" 
is writ large over the gates of all Western cities 
— literally in letters of fire at railway-stations. 



40 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

Approaching a town the motorist finds himself 
courteously welcomed and politely requested 
to respect the local speed law, and as he de- 
parts a sign at the postern thanks him and urges 
his return. The Western town is distinguished 
as much by its generous hospitality as by its en- 
terprise, its firm purpose to develop new terri- 
tory and widen its commercial influence. The 
visitor is bewildered by the warmth with which 
he is seized and scheduled for a round of ex- 
hausting festivities. He may enjoy all the de- 
lights that attend the triumphal tour of a debu- 
tante launched upon a round of visits to the 
girls she knew in school or college; and he will 
be conscious of a sincerity, a real pride and 
joy in his presence, that warms his heart to 
the community. Passing on from one town to 
another, say from Cincinnati to Cleveland, 
from Kansas City to Denver, from Omaha to 
Minneapolis, he finds that news of his approach 
has preceded him. The people he has met at 
his last stopping-place have wired everybody 
they know at the next point in his itinerary to 
be on the lookout for him, and he finds that in- 
stead of entering a strange port there are friends 
— veritable friends — awaiting him. If by 
chance he escapes the eye of the reception com- 
mittee and enters himself on the books of an 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 41 

inn, he is interrupted in his unpacking by offers 
of lodging in the homes of people he never saw 
before. 

There is no other region in America where 
so much history has been crowded into so brief 
a period, where young commonwealths so quickly 
attained political power and influence as in the 
Middle West; but the founding of States and 
the establishment of law is hardly more in- 
teresting than the transfer to the wilderness of 
the dignities and amenities of life. From the 
verandas of country clubs or handsome villas 
scattered along the Great Lakes, one may al- 
most witness the receding pageant of discovery 
and settlement. In Wisconsin and Michigan 
the golfer in search of an elusive ball has been 
known to stumble upon an arrow-head, a sig- 
nificant reminder of the newness of the land; 
and the motorist flying across Ohio, Indiana, 
and Illinois sees log cabins that survive from 
the earliest days, many of them still occupied. 

Present comfort and luxury are best viewed 
against a background of pioneer life; at least 
the sense of things hoped for and realized in 
these plains is more impressive as one ponders 
the self-sacrifice and heroism by which the soil 
was conquered and peopled. The friendliness, 
the eagerness to serve that are so charming 



42 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

and winning in the West date from those times 
when one who was not a good neighbor was a 
potential enemy. Social life was largely de- 
pendent upon exigencies that brought the busy 
pioneers together, to cut timber, build homes, 
add a barn to meet growing needs, or to assist 
in "breaking" new acres. The women, eagerly 
seizing every opportunity to vary the monot- 
ony of their lonely Uves, gathered with the men, 
and while the axes swung in the woodland 
or the plough turned up the new soil, held a 
quilting, spun flax, made clothing, or otherwise 
assisted the hostess to get ahead with her never- 
ending labors. To-day, throughout the broad 
valley the grandchildren and great-grandchil- 
dren of the pioneers ply the tennis-racket and 
dance in country club-houses beside lakes and 
rivers where their forebears drove the plough 
or swung the axe all day, and rode miles to dance 
on a puncheon floor. There was marrying and 
giving in marriage; children were born and 
"raised" amid conditions that cause one to 
smile at the child- welfare and "better-baby" 
societies of these times. The affections were 
deepened by the close union of the family in the 
intimate association of common tasks. Here, 
indeed, was a practical application of the dic- 
tum of one for all and all for one. 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 43 

The lines of contact between isolated clear- 
ings and meagre settlements were never wholly 
broken. Months might pass without a house- 
hold seeing a strange face, but always some 
one was on the way — an itinerant missionary, 
a lost hunter, a pioneer looking for a new field 
to conquer. Motoring at ease through the 
country, one marvels at the journeys accom- 
plished when blazed trails were the only high- 
ways. A pioneer railroad-builder once told 
me of a pilgrimage he made on horseback from 
northern Indiana to the Hermitage in Ten- 
nessee to meet Old Hickory face to face. Jack- 
son had captivated his boyish fancy and this 
arduous journey was a small price to pay for 
the honor of viewing the hero on his own acres. 
I may add that this gentleman achieved his 
centennial, remaining a steadfast adherent of 
Jacksonian democracy to the end of his life. 
Once I accompanied him to the polls and he 
donned a silk hat for the occasion, as appropriate 
to the dignified exercise of his franchise. 

There was a distinct type of restless, adven- 
turous pioneer who Uked to keep a little ahead 
of civilization; who found that he could not 
breathe freely when his farm, acquainted for 
only a few years with the plough, became the 
centre of a neighborhood. Men of this sort 



44 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

persuaded themselves that there was better 
land to be had farther on, though, naore or less 
consciously, it was freedom they craved. The 
exodus of the Lincolns from Kentucky through 
Indiana, where they lingered fourteen years 
before seeking a new home in Illinois, is typical 
of the pioneer restlessness. In a day when the 
effects of a household could be moved in one 
wagon and convoyed by the family on horse- 
back, these transitions were undertaken with 
the utmost light-heartedness. Only a little 
while ago I heard a woman of eighty describe 
her family's removal from Kentucky to Illinois, 
a wide detour being made that they might visit 
a distant relative in central Indiana. This, 
from her recital, must have been the joUiest 
of excursions, for the children at least, with the 
daily experiences of fording streams, the con- 
stant uncertainties as to the trail, and the camp- 
ing out in the woods when no cabin offered 
shelter. 

It was a matter of pride with the housewife 
to make generous provision for *' company," 
and the pioneer annalists dwell much upon the 
good provender of those days, when venison 
and wild turkeys were to be had for the killing 
and corn pone or dodger was the only bread. 
The reputation of being a good cook was quite 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 45 

as honorable as that of being a successful farmer 
or a lucky hunter. The Princeton University 
Press has lately resurrected and republished 
"The New Purchase," by Baynard Rush Hall, 
a graduate of Union College and of Princeton 
Theological Seminary, one of the raciest and 
most amusing of mid-Western chronicles. Hall 
sought "a life of poetry and romance amid the 
rangers of the wood," and in 1823 became prin- 
cipal of Indiana Seminary, the precursor of the 
State University. Having enjoyed an ampler 
experience of life than his neighbors, he was 
able to view the pioneers with a degree of de- 
tachment, though sympathetically. 

No other contemporaneous account of the 
social life of the period approaches this for 
fulness; certainly none equals it in humor. 
The difficulties of transportation, the encom- 
passing wilderness all but impenetrable, the 
oddities of frontier character, the simple menage 
of the pioneer, his food, and the manner of its 
preparation, and the general social spectacle, 
are described by a master reporter. One of 
his best chapters is devoted to a wedding and 
the subsequent feast, where a huge potpie was 
the piece de resistance. He estimates that at 
least six hens, two chanticleers, and four pullets 
were lodged in this doughy sepulchre, which 



46 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

was encircled by roast wild turkeys "stuffed" 
with Indian meal and sausages. Otherwise 
there were fried venison, fried turkey, fried 
chicken, fried duck, fried pork, and, he adds, 
"for anything I knew, even fried leather!" 

II 

The pioneer adventure in the trans-Missis- 
sippi States differed materially from that of 
the timbered areas of the old Northwest Terri- 
tory. I incline to the belief that the forest 
primeval had a socializing effect upon those 
who first dared its fastnesses, binding the lonely 
pioneers together by mysterious ties which the 
open plain lacked. The Southern infusion in 
the States immediately north of the Ohio un- 
doubtedly influenced the early social life greatly. 
The Kentuckian, for example, carried his pas- 
sion for sociability into Indiana, and pages of 
pioneer history in the Hoosier State might have 
been lifted bodily from Kentucky chronicles, 
so similar is their flavor. The Kentuckian was 
always essentially social; he likes "the swarm," 
remarks Mr. James Lane Allen. To seek a 
contrast, the early social picture in Kansas is 
obscured by the fury of the battle over slavery 
that dominates the foreground. Other States 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 47 

fought Indians and combated hunger, survived 
malaria, brimstone and molasses and calomel, 
and kept in good humor, but the settlement of 
Kansas was attended with battle, murder, and 
sudden death. The pioneers of the Northwest 
Territory began life in amiable accord with 
their neighbors; Kansas gained Statehood after 
a bitter war with her sister Missouri, though 
the contest may not be viewed as a local dis- 
turbance, but as a "curtain raiser" for the 
drama of the Civil War. When in the strenuous 
fifties Missouri undertook to colonize the Kansas 
plains with pro-slavery sympathizers, New Eng- 
land rose in majesty to protest. She not only 
protested vociferously but sent colonies to hold 
the plain against the invaders. Life in the 
Kansas of those years of strife was unrelieved 
by any gayeties. One searches in vain for traces 
of the comfort and cheer that are a part of the 
tradition of the settlement of the Ohio valley 
States. Professor Spring, in his history of Kan- 
sas, writes: "For amusement the settlers were 
left entirely to their own resources. Lectures, 
concert troupes, and shows never ventured far 
into the wilderness. Yet there was much broad, 
rollicking, noisy merrymaking, but it must be 
confessed that rum and whiskey — lighter 
liquors like wine and beer could not be ob- 



48 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

tained — had a good deal to do with it. . . . 
Schools, churches, and the various appliances 
of older civilization got under way and made 
some growth; but they were still in a primitive, 
inchoate condition when Kansas took her place 
in the Union." 

There is hardly another American State in 
which the social organization may be observed as 
readily as in Kansas. For the reason that its 
history and the later *' social scene" constitute 
so compact a picture I find myself returning 
to it frequently for illustrations and compari- 
sons. Born amid tribulation, having indeed 
been subjected to the ordeal of fire, Kansas 
marks Puritanism's farthest west; her people 
are still proud to call their State "The Child 
of Plymouth Rock." The New Englanders 
who settled the northeastern part of the Terri- 
tory were augmented after the Civil War by 
men of New England stock who had established 
themselves in Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa when 
the war began, and having acquired soldiers' 
homestead rights made use of them to pre-empt 
land in the younger commonwealth. The in- 
flux of veterans after Appomattox sealed the 
right of Kansas to be called a typical American 
State. "Kansas sent practically every able- 
bodied man of military age to the Civil War," 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 49 

says Mr. William Allen White, "and when they 
came back literally hundreds of thousands of 
other soldiers came with them and took home- 
steads." For thirty years after Kansas attained 
Statehood her New Englanders were a domi- 
nating factor in her development, and their in- 
fluence is still clearly perceptible. The State 
may be considered almost as one vast planta- 
tion, peopled by industrious, aspiring men and 
women. Class distinctions are little known; 
snobbery, where it exists, hides itself to avoid 
ridicule; the State abounds in the "comfort- 
ably well off" and the "well-to-do"; millionaires 
are few and well tamed; every other family 
boasts an automobile. 

While the poHtical and economic results of 
the Civil War have been much written of, its 
influence upon the common relationships of 
life in the border States that it so profoundly 
affected are hardly less interesting. The pioneer 
period was becoming a memory, the conditions 
of life had grown comfortable, and there was 
ease in Zion when the young generation met 
a new demand upon their courage. Many were 
permanently lifted out of the sphere to which 
they were born and thrust forth into new avenues 
^f opportunity. This was not of course pecuHar 
to the West, though in the Mississippi valley 



50 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

the effects were so closely intermixed with those 
of the strenuous post-bellum political history 
that they are indelibly written into the record. 
Local hostilities aroused by the conflict were of 
long duration; the copperhead was never for- 
given for his disloyalty; it is remembered to 
this day against his descendants. Men who, 
in all likelihood, would have died in obscurity 
but for the changes and chances of war rose 
to high position. The most conspicuous of such 
instances is afforded by Grant, whose circum- 
stances and prospects were the poorest when 
Fame flung open her doors to him. 

Nothing pertaining to the war of the sixties 
impresses the student more than the rapidity 
with which reputations were made or lost or 
the effect upon the participants of their mili- 
tary experiences. From farms, shops, and 
offices men were flung into the most stirring 
scenes the nation had known. They emerged 
with the glory of battle upon them to become 
men of mark in their communities, wearing a 
new civic and social dignity. It would be in- 
teresting to know how many of the survivors 
attained civil office as the reward of their valor; 
in the Western States I should say that few 
escaped some sort of recognition on the score 
of their military services. In the city that I 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 51 

know best of all, where for three decades at 
least the most distinguished citizens — cer- 
tainly the most respected and honored — were 
veterans of the Civil War, it has always seemed 
to me remarkable and altogether reassuring as 
proof that we need never fear the iron collar 
of militarism, that those men of the sixties so 
quickly readjusted themselves in peaceful occu- 
pations. There were those who capitalized 
their miKtary achievements, but the vast number 
had gone to war from the highest patriotic mo- 
tives and, having done their part, were glad to 
be quit of it. The shifting about and the new 
social experiences were responsible for many 
romances. Men met and married women of 
whose very existence they would have been 
ignorant but for the fortunes of war, and in 
these particulars history was repeating itself 
last year before our greatest military adventure 
had really begun ! 

The sudden appearance of thousands of khaki- 
clad young men in the summer and fall of 1917 
marked a new point of orientation in American 
life. Romance mounted his charger again; 
everywhere one met the wistful war bride. The 
familiar academic ceremonials of college com- 
mencements in the West as in the East were 
transformed into tributes to the patriotism of 



52 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

the graduates and undergraduates already under 
arms and present in their new uniforms. These 
young men, encountered in the street, in clubs, 
in hurried visits to their offices as they trans- 
ferred their affairs to other hands, were im- 
pressively serious and businesslike. In the 
training-camps one heard familiar college songs 
rather than battle hymns. Even country- 
club dances and other functions given for the 
entertainment of the young soldiers were lack- 
ing in Hght-heartedness. In a Minneapolis 
country club much affected by candidates for 
commissions at Fort Snelling, the Saturday- 
night dances closed with the playing of "The 
Star-Spangled Banner"; every face turned in- 
stantly toward the flag; every hand came to 
salute; and the effect was to send the whole 
company, young and old, soberly into the night. 
In the three training and mobilizing camps that 
I visited through the first months of prepara- 
tion — Forts Benjamin Harrison, Sheridan, and 
Snelling — there was no ignoring the quiet, 
dogged attitude of the sons of the West, who 
had no hatred for the people they were enlisted 
to fight (I heard many of them say this), but 
were animated by a feeling that something 
greater even than the dignity and security of 
this nation, something of deep import to the 
whole world had called them. 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 53 



III 



In "The American Scene" Mr. James ignored 
the West, perhaps as lacking in those back- 
grounds and perspectives that most strongly 
appealed to him. It is for the reason that ''po- 
lite society," as we find it in Western cities, 
has only the scant pioneer background that I 
have indicated that it is so surprising in the 
dignity and richness of its manifestations. If 
it is a meritorious thing for people in prosperous 
circumstances to spend their money generously 
and with good taste in the entertainment of 
their friends, to effect combinations of the con- 
genial in balls, dinners, musicals, and the like, 
then the social spectacle in the Western provinces 
is not a neghgible feature of their activities. If 
an aristocracy is a desirable thing in America, 
the West can, in its cities great and small, pro- 
duce it, and its quality and tone will be found 
quite similar to the aristocracy of older com- 
munities. We of the West are not so callous 
as our critics would have us appear, and we 
are only politely tolerant of the persistence with 
which fiction and the drama are illuminated 
with characters whose chief purpose is to illus- 
trate the raw vulgarity of Western civilization. 
Such persons are no more acceptable socially 



54 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

in Chicago, Minneapolis, or Denver than they 
are in New York. The country is so closely 
knit together that a fashionable gathering in 
one place presents very much the appearance 
of a similar function in another. New York, 
socially speaking, is very hospitable to the 
Southerner; the South has a tradition of aris- 
tocracy that the West lacks. In both New 
York and Boston a very different tone char- 
acterizes the mention of a Southern girl and 
any reference to a daughter of the West. The 
Western girl may be every bit as "nice" and 
just as cultivated as the Southern girl: they 
would be indistinguishable one from the other 
save for the Southern girl's speech, which we 
discover to be not provincial but "so charm- 
ingly Southern." 

Perhaps I may here safely record my impa- 
tience of the pretension that provincialism is 
anywhere admirable. A provincial character 
may be interesting and amusing as a type; he 
may be commendably curious about a great num- 
ber of things and even possess considerable in- 
formation, without being blessed with the vision 
to correlate himself with the world beyond the 
nearest haystack. I do not share the opinion 
of some of my compatriots of the Western 
provinces that our speech is really the standard 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 55 

English, that the Western voice is impeccable, 
or that culture and manners have attained 
among us any noteworthy dignity that entitles 
us to strut before the rest of the world. Cul- 
ture is not a term to be used lightly, and cul- 
ture, as, say, Matthew Arnold understood it 
and labored to extend its sphere, is not more 
respected in these younger States than else- 
where in America. We are offering innumerable 
vehicles of popular education; we point with 
pride to public schools. State and privately 
endowed universities, and to smaller colleges 
of the noblest standards and aims; but, even 
with these so abundantly provided, it cannot 
be maintained that culture in its strict sense 
cries insistently to the Western imagination. 
There are people of culture, yes; there are 
social expressions both interesting and charm- 
ing; but our preoccupations are mainly with 
the utilitarian, an attitude wholly defensible 
and explainable in the light of our newness, 
the urgent need of bread-winning in our recent 
yesterdays. However, with the easing in the 
past fifty years of the conditions of life there 
followed quite naturally a restlessness, an eager- 
ness to fill and drain the cup of enjoyment, that 
was only interrupted by our entrance into the 
world war. There are people, rich and poor. 



56 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

in these States who are devotedly attached to 
"whatsoever things are lovely," but that they 
exert any wide influence or color deeply the 
social fabric is debatable. It is possible that 
*' sweetness and light," as we shall ultimately 
attain them, will not be an efflorescence of litera- 
ture or the fine arts, but a realization of justice, 
highly conceived, and a perfected system of 
government that will assure the happiness, 
contentment, and peace of the great body of 
our citizenry. 

In the smaller Western towns, especially 
where the American stock is dominant, line£> 
of social demarcation are usually obscure to 
the vanishing-point. Schools and churches are 
here a democratizing factor, and a woman who 
"keeps help" is very likely to be apologetic 
about it; she is anxious to avoid the appear- 
ance of "uppishness" — an unpardonable sin. 
It is impossible for her to ignore the fact that 
the "girl" in her kitchen has, very likely, gone 
to school with her children or has been a mem- 
ber of her Sunday-school class. The reluctance 
of American girls to accept employment as 
house-servants is an aversion not to be over- 
come in the West. Thousands of women in 
comfortable conditions of life manage their 
homes without outside help other than that of 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 57 

a neighborhood man or a versatile syndicate 
woman who "comes in" to assist in a weekly 
cleaning. 

/There is a type of small-town woman who 
makes something quite casual and incidental 
of the day's tasks. Her social enjoyments are 
in no way hampered if, in entertaining com- 
pany, she prepares with her own hands the 
viands for the feast. She takes the greatest 
pride in her household; she is usually a capital 
cook and is not troubled by any absurd feeling 
that she has ''demeaned" herself by preparing 
and serving a meal. She does this exceedingly 
well, and rises without embarrassment to change 
the plates and bring in the salad. The salad is 
excellent and she knows it is excellent and sub- 
mits with becoming modesty to praise of her 
handiwork. In homes which it is the highest 
privilege to visit a joke is made of the house- 
keeping. The lady of the house performs the 
various rites in keeping with maternal tradition 
and the latest approved text-books. You may, 
if you like, accompany her to the kitchen and 
watch the broiling of your chop, noting the per- 
fection of the method before testing the result, 
and all to the accompaniment of charming talk 
about life and letters or what you will. Cor- 
porate feeding in public mess-halls will make 



58 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

slow headway with these strongly individuahstic 
women of the new generation who read pro- 
digiously, manage a baby with their eyes on 
Pasteur, and are as proud of their biscuits 
as of their club papers, which we know to be 
admirable. 

Are women less prone to snobbishness than 
men ? Contrary to the general opinion, I think 
they are. Their gentler natures shrink from un- 
kindness, from the petty cruelties of social dif- 
ferentiation which may be made very poignant 
in a town of five or ten thousand people, where 
one cannot pretend with any degree of plausibil- 
ity that one does not know one's neighbor, or 
that the daughter of a section foreman or the 
son of the second-best grocer did not sit beside 
one's own Susan or Thomas in the public school. 
The banker's ofifspring may find the children of 
the owner of the stave-factory or the planing- 
mill more congenial associates than the chil- 
dren on the back streets; but when the banker's 
wife gives a birthday party for Susan the invi- 
tations are not limited to the children of the 
immediate neighbors but include every child in 
town who has the slightest claim upon her hos- 
pitality. The point seems to be established 
that one may be poor and yet be "nice"; and 
this is a very comforting philosophy and no 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 59 

mean touchstone of social fitness. I may add 
that the mid- Western woman, in spite of her 
strong individuahsm in domestic matters, is, 
broadly speaking, fundamentally socialistic. She 
is the least bit uncomfortable at the thought of 
inequalities of privilege and opportunity. Not 
long ago I met in Chicago an old friend, a man 
who has added greatly to an inherited fortune. 
To my inquiry as to what he was doing in town 
he replied ruefully that he was going to buy his 
wife some clothes ! He explained that in her 
preoccupation with philanthropy and social 
welfare she had grown not merely indifiFerent 
to the call of fashion, but that she seriously 
questioned her right to adorn herself while 
her less favored sisters suffered for life's neces- 
sities. This is an extreme case, though I can 
from my personal acquaintance duplicate it 
in half a dozen instances of women born to 
ease and able to command luxury who very 
sincerely share this feeling. 



IV 



The social edifice is like a cabinet of file-boxes 
conveniently arranged so that they may be 
drawn out and pondered by the curious. The 
seeker of types is so prone to look for the ec- 



60 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

centric, the fantastic (and I am not without 
my interest in these varieties), which so aston- 
ishingly repeat themselves, that he is hkely 
to ignore the claims of the normal, the real 
"folksy" bread-and-butter people who are, after 
all, the mainstay of our democracy. They are 
not to be scornfully waved aside as bourgeoisie, 
or prodded with such ironies as Arnold ap- 
plied to the middle class in England. They 
constitute the most interesting and admirable 
of our social strata. There is nothing quite 
like them in any other country; nowhere else 
have comfort, opportunity, and aspiration pro- 
duced the same combination. 

The traveller's curiosity is teased constantly, 
as he cruises through the towns and cities of 
the Middle West, by the numbers of homes 
that cannot imaginably be maintained on less 
than five thousand dollars a year. The 
economic basis of these establishments invites 
speculation; in my own city I am ignorant of 
the means by which hundreds of such homes 
are conducted — homes that testify to the 
West's growing good taste in domestic archi- 
tecture and shelter people whose ambitions are 
worthy of highest praise. There was a time 
not so remote when I could identify at sight 
every pleasure vehicle in town. A man who 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 61 

kept a horse and buggy was thought to be 
"'putting on" a Httle; if he set up a carriage 
and two horses he was, unless he enjoyed pubhc 
confidence in the highest degree, viewed with 
distrust and suspicion. When in the eighties 
an Indianapohs bank failed, a cynical old citizen 
remarked of its president that *'no wonder 
Blank busted, swelling 'round in a carriage 
with a nigger in uniform"! Nowadays thou- 
sands of citizens blithely disport themselves 
in automobiles that cost several times the value 
of that banker's equipage. I have confided 
my bewilderment to friends in other cities and 
find the same ignorance of the economic foun- 
dation of this prosperity. The existence, in 
cities of one, two, and three hundred thousand 
people of so many whom we may call non-pro- 
ducers — professional men, managers, agents — 
offers a stimulating topic for a doctoral thesis. 
I am not complaining of this phenomenon — I 
merely wonder about it. 

The West's great natural wealth and extraor- 
dinary development is nowhere more strikingly 
denoted than in the thousands of comfortable 
homes, in hundreds of places, set on forty or 
eighty foot lots that were tilled land or forest 
fifty or twenty years ago. Cruising through 
the West, one enters every city through new 



62 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

additions, frequently sliced out of old forests, 
with the maples, elms, or beeches carefully 
retained. Bungalows are inadvertently jotted 
down as though enthusiastic young architects 
were using the landscape for sketch-paper. I 
have inspected large settlements in which no 
two of these habitations are alike, though the 
difference may be only a matter of pulling the 
roof a little lower over the eyes of the veranda 
or some idiosyncrasy in the matter of the chim- 
ney. The trolley and the low-priced automobile 
are continually widening the urban arc, so that 
the acre lot or even a larger estate is within 
the reach of city-dwellers who have a weakness 
for country air and home-grown vegetables. 
A hedge, a second barricade of hollyhocks, a 
flower-box on the veranda rail, and a splash 
of color when the crimson ramblers are in bloom 
— here the hunter of types keeps his note-book 
in hand and wishes that Henry Cuyler Bunner 
were alive to bring his fine perceptions and 
sympathies to bear upon these homes and their 
attractive inmates. 

The young woman we see inspecting the 
mignonette or admonishing the iceman to 
greater punctuality in his deliveries, would 
have charmed a lyric from Aldrich. The new 
additions are, we know, contrived for her special 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 63 

delight. She and her neighbors are not to be 
confounded with young wives in apartments 
with kitchenette attached who lean heavily 
upon the delicatessen-shop and find their sole 
intellectual stimulus in vaudeville or the dumb 
drama. It is inconceivable that any one should 
surprise the mistresses of these bungalows in 
a state of untidiness, that their babies should 
not be sound and encouraging specimens of 
the human race, or that the arrival of unex- 
pected guests should not find their pantries 
fortified with delicious strawberries or trans- 
parent jellies of their own conserving. These 
young women and their equally young hus- 
bands are the product of the high schools, or 
perhaps they have been fellow students in a 
State university. With all the world before 
them where to choose and Providence their 
guide, they have elected to attack life together 
and they go about it joyfully. Let no one 
imagine that they lead starved lives or lack 
social diversion. Do the housekeepers not 
gather on one another's verandas every summer 
afternoon to discuss the care of infants or wars 
and rumors of wars; and is there not tennis 
when their young lords come home? On oc- 
casions of supreme indulgence the neighbor- 
hood laundress watches the baby while they 



64 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

go somewhere to dance or to a play, lecture, or 
concert in town. They are all musical; in- 
deed, the whole Middle West is melodious with 
the tinklings of what Mr. George Ade, with 
brutal impiety, styles ''the upright agony box." 
Or, denied the piano, these habitations at least 
boast the tuneful disk and command at will 
the voices of Farrar and Caruso. 



It is in summer that the Middle Western 
provinces most candidly present themselves, 
not only because the fields then publish their 
richness but for the ease with which the people 
may be observed. The study of types may 
then be pursued along the multitudinous ave-^ 
nues in which the Folks disport themselves in 
search of pleasure. The smoothing-out processes, 
to which schools, tailors, dressmakers, and 
"shine-'em" parlors contribute, add to the perils 
of the type-hunter. Mr. Howells's remark of 
twenty years ago or more, that the polish slowly 
dims on footgear as one travels westward, has 
ceased to be true; types once familiar are so 
disguised or modified as to be unrecognizable. 
Even the Western county-seat, long rich in 
"character," now flaunts the smartest apparel 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 65 

in its shop-windows, and when it reappears in 
Main Street upon the forms of the citizens one 
is convinced of the local prosperity and good 
taste. The keeper of the livery-stable, a stout 
gentleman, who knows every man, woman, 
and child in the county and aspires to the 
shrievalty, has bowed before the all-pervasive 
automobile. He has transformed his stable 
into a garage (with a plate-glass "front" ex- 
posing the latest model) and hides his galluses 
(shamelessly exhibited in the day of the horse) 
under a coat of modish cut, in deference to 
the sensibilities of lady patrons. The coun- 
try lawyer is abandoning the trailing frock 
coat, once the sacred vestment of his profes- 
sion, having found that the wrinkled tails 
evoked unfavorable comment from his sons 
and daughters when they came home from 
college. The village drunkard is no longer 
pointed out commiseratingly; local option and 
State-wide prohibition have destroyed his use- 
fulness as an awful example, and his resource- 
fulness is taxed to the utmost that he may keep 
tryst with the skulking bootlegger. 

Every town used to have a usurer, a mer- 
chant who was "mean" (both of these were 
frequently pillars in the church), and a di- 
shevelled photographer whose artistic ability 



66 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

was measured by the success of his efforts to 
make the baby laugh. He solaced himself with 
the flute or violin between "'sittings," not wholly 
without reference to the charms of the milliner 
over the way. In the towns I have in mind 
there was always the young man who would 
have had a brilliant career but for his passion 
for gambling, the aleatory means of his de- 
struction being an all-night poker-game in the 
back room of his law-ofllce opposite the court- 
house. He may appropriately be grouped with 
the man who had been ruined by ''going secu- 
rity" for a friend, who was spoken of pityingly 
while the beneficiary of his misplaced confidence, 
having gained affluence, was execrated. The race 
is growing better and wiser, and by one means 
and another these types have been forced from the 
stage; or perhaps more properly it should be said 
that the stage and the picture-screen alone seem 
unaware that they have passed into oblivion. 

The town band remains, however, and it is 
one of the mysteries of our civilization that 
virtuosi, capable of performing upon any in- 
strument, exist in the smallest hamlet and meet 
every Saturday night for practice in the lodge- 
room over the grocery. I was both auditor and 
spectator of such a rehearsal one night last 
summer, in a small town in Illinois. From the 




u 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 67 

garage across the street it was possible to hear 
and see the artists, and to be aware of the leader's 
zeal and his stern, critical attitude toward the 
performers. He seized first the cornet and then 
the trombone (Hoosierese, sliphorn) to dem- 
onstrate the proper phrasing of a difficult pas- 
sage. The universal Main Street is made fes- 
tive on summer nights by the presence of the 
town's fairest daughters, clothed in white samite, 
mystic, wonderful, who know every one and 
gossip democratically with their friend the white- 
jacketed young man who lords it at the drug- 
gist's soda-fountain. Such a group gathered 
and commented derisively upon the experiments 
of the musicians. That the cornetist was in 
private life an assistant to the butcher touched 
their humor; the evocation of melody and the 
purveying of meat seemed to them irreconcila- 
ble. In every such town there is a male quar- 
tette that sings the old-time melodies at church 
entertainments and other gatherings. These 
vocaKsts add to the joy of living, and I should 
lament their passing. Their efforts are more 
particularly pleasing when, supplemented by 
guitar and banjo, they move through verdurous 
avenues thrumming and singing as they go. 
Somewhere a lattice opens guardedly — how 
young the world is ! 



68 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

The adventurous boy who, even in times of 
peace, was scornful of formal education and 
ran away to enlist in the navy or otherwise 
sought to widen the cramped horizons of home 
— and every town has this boy — still reap- 
pears at intervals to report to his parents and 
submit to the admiration and envy of his old 
schoolmates in the Main Street bazaars. This 
type endures and will, very likely, persist while 
there are seas to cross and battles to be won. 
The trumpetings of war stir the blood of such 
youngsters, and since our entrance into the war 
it has been my fortune to know many of them, 
who were anxious to dare the skies or play with 
death in the waters under the earth. The West 
has no monopoly of courage or daring, but it 
was reassuring to find that the best blood of 
the Great Valley thrilled to the cry of the bugle. 
On a railway -train I fell into talk with a young 
officer of the national army. Finding that I 
knew the president of the Western college that 
he had attended, he sketched for me a career 
which, in view of his twenty-six years, was al- 
most incredible. At eighteen he had enlisted in 
the navy in the hope of seeing the world, but 
had been assigned to duty as a hospital orderly. 
Newport had been one of his stations; there 
and at other places where he had served he 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 69 

spent his spare hours in study. When he was 
discharged he signed papers on a British mer- 
chant vessel. The ship was short-handed and 
he was enrolled as an able seaman, which, he 
said, was an unwarranted compliment, as he 
proved to the captain's satisfaction when he 
was sent to the wheel and nearly (as he put it) 
bowled over a lighthouse. His voyages had 
carried him to the Orient and the austral seas. 
After these wanderings he was realizing an 
early ambition to go to college when the war- 
drum sounded. He had taken the training at 
an officer's reserve camp and was on his way to 
his first assignment. The town he mentioned 
as his home is hardly more than a whistling- 
point for locomotives, and I wondered later, 
as I flashed through it, just what stirring of the 
spirit had made its peace intolerable and sent 
him roaming.* At a club dinner I met another 
man, born not far from the town that produced 
my sailor-soldier, who had fought with the 
Canadian troops from the beginning of the 
war until discharged because of wounds re- 
ceived on the French front. His pocketful of 
medals — he carried them boyishly, like so 
many marbles, in his trousers pocket ! — in- 
cluded the croix de guerre, and he had been 
decorated at Buckingham Palace by King 

* Kenneth Victor Elliott, of Sheridan, Indiana. He died in battle, 
giving his youth and his high hope of life for the America he loved 
with a passionate devotion. 



70 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

George. He had been a wanderer from boy- 
hood, his father told me, visiting every part of 
the world that promised adventure and, inci- 
dentally, was twice wounded in the Boer War. 
The evolution of a type is not, with Mother 
Nature, a hasty business, and in attempting 
to answer an inquiry for a definition of the 
typical mid-Western girl, I am disposed to 
spare myself humiliating refutations by de- 
claring that there is no such thing. In the 
Rocky Mountain States and in California, we 
know, if the motion-picture purveyors may 
be trusted, that the typical young woman of 
those regions always wears a sombrero and 
lives upon the back of a bronco. However, in 
parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where there 
has been a minimum of intermixture since the 
original settlements, one is fairly safe in the 
choice of types. I shall say that in this partic- 
ular territory the typical young woman is brown- 
haired, blue or brown of eye, of medium height, 
with a slender, mobile face that is reminiscent 
of Celtic influences. Much Scotch-Irish blood 
flowed into the Ohio valley in the early immi- 
gration, and the type survives. In the streets 
and in public gatherings in Wisconsin and 
Minnesota the German and Scandinavian in- 
fusion is clearly manifest. On the lake-docks 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 71 

and in lumber-camps the big fellows of the 
North in their Mackinaw coats and close-fitting 
knit caps impart a heroic note to the landscape* 
In January, 1917, having gone to St. Paul to 
] witness the winter carnival, I w^as struck by the 
great number of tall, fair men who, in their gay 
holiday attire, satisfied the most exacting ideal 
of the children of the vikings. They trod the 
snow with kingly majesty, and to see their per- 
formances on skis is to be persuaded that the 
sagas do not exaggerate the daring of their 
ancestors. 

" What was that ? " said Olaf , standing 

On the quarter deck. 
"Something heard I Hke the stranding 
Of a shattered wreck." 
Einar then, the arrow taking 

From the loosened string, 
Answered "that was Norway breaking 
From thy hand, O king ! " 

The search for characteristic traits is likely 
to be more fruitful of tangible results than the 
attempt to fix physical types, and the Western 
girl who steps from the high schools to the State 
universities that so hospitably open their doors 
to her may not be the type, but she is indubi- 
tably a type, well defined. The lore of the ages 
has been preserved and handed down for her 
special benefit and she absorbs and assimilates 



72 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

it with ease and grace. Man is no enigma to 
her; she begins her analysis of the male in high 
school, and the university offers a post-graduate 
course in the species. Young men are not more 
serious over the affairs of their Greek-letter 
societies than these young women in the manage- 
ment of their sororities, which seem, after school- 
days, to call for constant reunions. It is not 
surprising that the Western woman has so val- 
iantly fought for and won recognition of her 
rights as a citizen. A girl who has matched 
her wits against boys in the high school and 
again in a State university, and very likely has 
surpassed them in scholarship, must be forgiven 
for assuming that the civil rights accorded them 
cannot fairly be withheld from her. The many 
thousands of young women who have taken 
degrees in these universities have played havoc 
with the Victorian tradition of womanhood. 
They constitute an independent, self-assured 
body, zealous in social and civic service, and 
not infrequently looking forward to careers. 

The State university is truly a well-spring 
of democracy; this may not be said too em- 
phatically. There is evidence of the pleasantest 
comradeship between men and women students, 
a^d one is impressed in classrooms by the pre- 
vailing good cheer and earnestness. 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 73 

"And one said, smiling, Pretty were the sight 
If our old halls could change their sex, and flaunt 
With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans, 
And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair." 

Mild flirtations are not regarded as detri- 
mental to the attainment of sound or even 
distinguished scholarship. The university's so- 
cial life may be narrow, but it is ampler than 
that of the farm or "home town." Against 
the argument that these institutions tend to 
the promotion of provincial insularity, it may 
be said that there is a compensating benefit 
in the mingling of students drawn largely from 
a single commonwealth. A gentleman whose 
education was gained in one of the older East- 
ern universities and in Europe remarked to me 
that, as his son expected to succeed him in the 
law, he was sending him to the university of 
his own State, for the reason that he would 
meet there young men whose acquaintance 
would later be of material assistance to him 
in his profession. 

VI 

The value of the Great Lakes as a social and 
recreational medium is hardly less than their 
importance as commercial highways. The salt- 
less seas are lined with summer colonies and in 



74 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

all the lake cities piers and beaches are a boon 
to the many who seek relief from the heat which 
we of the West always speak of defensively as 
essential to the perfecting of the corn that is 
our pride. Chicago's joke that it is the best of 
summer resorts is not without some foundation; 
certainly one may find there every variety of 
amusement except salt-water bathing. The 
salt's stimulus is not missed apparently by the 
vast number of citizens — estimated at two 
hundred thousand daily during the fiercest 
heat — who disport themselves on the shore. 
The new municipal pier is a prodigious struc- 
ture, and I know of no place in America where 
the student of mankind may more profitably 
plant himself for an evening of contemplation. 
What struck me in a series of observations 
of the people at play, extending round the lakes 
from Chicago to Cleveland, was the general 
good order and decorum. At Detroit I was in- 
troduced to two dancing paviUons on the river- 
side, where the prevailing sobriety was most 
depressing in view of my promise to the illus- 
trator that somewhere in our pilgrimage I 
should tax his powers with scenes of depravity 
and violence. A quarter purchased a string of 
six tickets, and one of these deposited in a box 
entitled the owner to take the floor with a part- 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 75 

ner. As soon as a dance and its several encores 
was over the floor cleared instantly and one 
was required to relinquish another ticket. There 
and in a similar dance-hall in a large Cleveland 
amusement park fully one-third of the patrons 
were young women who danced together 
throughout the evening, and often children 
tripped into the picture. Chaperonage was af- 
forded by vigilant parents comfortably estab- 
lished in the balcony. The Cleveland resort, 
accessible to any one for a small fee, interested 
me particularly because the people were so 
well apparelled, so "good-looking," and the 
atmosphere was so charged with the spirit of 
neighborliness. The favorite dances there were 
the waltz (old style), the fox-trot, and the 
schottische. I confess that this recrudescence 
of the schottische in Cleveland, a progressive 
city that satisfies so many of the cravings of 
the aspiring soul — the home of three-cent car- 
fares and a noble art museum — greatly aston- 
ished me. But for the fact that warning of 
each number was flashed on the wall I should 
not have trusted my judgment that what I 
beheld was, indeed, the schottische. Frankly 
I do not care for the schottische, and it may 
have been that my tone or manner betokened 
resentment at its revival; at any rate a police- 



76 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

man whom I interviewed outside the paviHon 
eyed me with suspicion when I expressed sur- 
prise that the schottische was so frequently an- 
nounced. When I asked why the one-step was 
ignored utterly he replied contemptuously that 
no doubt I could find places around Cleveland 
where that kind of rough stuff was permitted, 
but "it don't go here!''' I did not undertake 
to defend the one-step to so stern a moralist, 
though it was in his eye that he wished me to 
do so that he might reproach me for my world- 
liness. I do not believe he meant to be unjust 
or harsh or even that he appraised me at once 
as a seeker of the rough stuff he abhorred; I 
had merely provided him with an excuse for 
proclaiming the moral standards of the city 
of Cleveland, which are high. I made note of 
the persistence of the Puritan influence in the 
Western Reserve and hastily withdrew in the 
direction of the trolley. 

Innumerable small lakes lie within the far- 
flung arms of the major lakes adding variety 
and charm to a broad landscape, and offering 
summer refuge to a host of vacationists. 
Northern Indiana is plentifully sprinkled with 
lakes and ponds; in Michigan, Wisconsin, and 
Minnesota there are thousands of them. I am 
moved to ask — is a river more companionable 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 77 

than a lake? I had always felt that a river 
had the best of the argument, as more neigh- 
borly and human, and I am still disposed to 
favor those streams of Maine that are played 
upon by the tides; but an acquaintance with 
a great number of these inland saucerfuls of 
blue water has made me their advocate. Happy 
is the town that has a lake for its back yard! 
The lakes of Minneapolis (there are ten within 
the municipal limits) are the distinguishing 
feature of that city. They seem to have been 
planted just where they are for the sole pur- 
pose of adorning it, and they have been pro- 
tected and utilized with rare prevision and 
judgment. To those who would chum with a 
river, St. Paul offers the Mississippi, where 
the battlements of the University Club project 
over a bluff from which the Father of Waters 
may be admired at leisure, and St. Paul will, 
if you insist, land you in one of the most de- 
lightful of country clubs on the shore of White 
Bear Lake. I must add that the country club 
has in the Twin Cities attained a rare state of 
perfection. That any one should wing far afield 
from either town in summer seems absurd, so 
blest are both in opportunities for outdoor 
enjoyment. 

Just how far the wide-spread passion for 



78 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

knitting has interfered with more vigorous 
sports among our young women I am unable 
to say, but the loss to Hnks and courts in the 
Western provinces must have been enormous. 
The Minikahda Club of Minneapolis was illu- 
minated one day by a girls' luncheon. These 
radiant young beings entered the dining-room 
knitting — knitting as gravely as though they 
were weaving the destinies of nations — and 
maybe they were! The small confusions and 
perplexities of seating the party of thirty were 
increased by the dropping of balls of yarn — and 
stitches ! The round table seemed to be looped 
with yarn, as though the war overseas were 
tightening its cords about those young women, 
whose brothers and cousins and sweethearts 
were destined to the battle-line. 

Longfellow celebrated in song "The Four 
Lakes of Madison," which he apostrophized 
as ''lovely handmaids." I treasure the memory 
of an approach round one of these lakes to 
Wisconsin's capitol (one of the few American 
State-houses that doesn't look like an appro- 
priation !) through a mist that imparted to the 
dome an inthralling illusion of detachment 
from the main body of the building. The 
first star twinkled above it; perhaps it was 
Wisconsin's star that had wandered out of the 




On a craft plying the waters of Erie I found all the conditions c f a happy 
outing and types that it is always a joy to meet. 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 79 

galaxy to symbolize for an hour the State's 
sovereignty ! 

Whatever one may miss on piers and in 
amusement parks in the way of types may be 
sought with confidence on the excursion steam- 
ers that ply the lakes — veritable arks in which 
humanity in countless varieties may be ob- 
served. The voyager is satisfied that the banana 
and peanut and the innocuous ''pop" are the 
ambrosia and nectar of our democracy. Before 
the boat leaves the dock the deck is littered; 
one's note-book bristles with memoranda of 
the untidiness and disorder. On a craft plying 
the waters of Erie I found all the conditions 
of a happy outing and types that it is always a 
joy to meet. The village ''cut-up," dashingly 
perched on the rail; the girl who is never so 
happy as when organizing and playing games; 
the young man who yearns to join her group, 
but is prevented by unconquerable shyness; 
the child that, carefully planted in the most 
crowded and inaccessible part of the deck, de- 
velops a thirst that results in the constant agita- 
tion of half the ship as his needs are satisfied. 
There is, inevitably, a woman of superior breed- 
ing who has taken passage on the boat by mis- 
take, believing it to be first-class, which it so 
undeniably is not; and if you wear a sympa- 



80 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

thetic countenance she will confide to you her 
indignation. The crunching of the peanut-shell, 
the poignant agony of the child that has loved 
the banana not wisely but too well, are an af- 
front to this lady. She announces haughtily 
that she's sure the boat is overcrowded, which 
it undoubtedly is, and that she means to report 
this trifling with human life to the authorities. 
That any one should covet the cloistral calm 
of a private yacht when the plain folks are so 
interesting and amusing is only another proof 
of the constant struggle of the aristocratic ideal 
to fasten itself upon our continent. 

Below there was a dining-saloon, but its 
seclusion was not to be preferred to an assault 
upon a counter presided over by one of the 
most remarkable young men I have ever seen. 
He was tall and of a slenderness, with a 
wonderful mane of fair hair brushed straight 
back from his pale brow. As he tossed sand- 
wiches and slabs of pie to the importunate he 
jerked his hair into place with a magnificent 
fling of the head. In moments when the ap- 
peals of starving supplicants became insistent, 
and he was confused by the pressure for atten- 
tion, he would rake his hair with his fingers, 
and then, wholly composed, swing round and 
resume the filling of orders. The young man 




The Perry monument at Put-in Bay. 
A huge column of concrete erected in commemoration of Commodore Perry's victory. 



TYPES AND DIVERSIONS 81 

from the check-room went to his assistance, 
but I felt that he resented this as an imperti- 
nence, a reflection upon his prowess. He needed 
no assistance; before that clamorous company 
he was the pattern of urbanity. His locks were 
his strength and his consolation; not once was 
his aplomb shaken, not even when a stocky 
gentleman fiercely demanded a whole pie ! 

While Perry's monument, a noble seamark 
at Put-in-Bay, is a reminder that the lakes 
have played their part in American history, it 
is at Mackinac that one experiences a sense of 
antiquity. The white-walled fort is a link be- 
tween the oldest and the newest, and the imag- 
ination quickens at the thought of the first 
adventurous white man who ever braved the 
uncharted waters; while the eye follows the 
interminable line of ore barges bound for the 
steel-mills on the southern curve of Michigan 
or on the shores of Erie. Commerce in these 
waters began with the fur-traders travelling in 
canoes; then came sailing vessels carrying 
supplies to the new camps and settlements 
and returning with lumber or produce; but 
to-day sails are rare and the long leviathans, 
fascinating in their apparent unwieldiness and 
undeniable ugliness, are the dominant medium 
of transportation. 



82 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

One night, a few years ago, on the breezy 
terrace of one of the handsomest villas in the 
lake region, I talked with the head of a great 
industry whose products are known round the^ 
world. His house, furnished with every com-^ 
fort and luxury, was gay with music and the 
laughter of young folk. Through the straits 
crawled the ships, bearing lumber, grain, and 
ore, signalling their passing in raucous blasts 
to the lookout at St. Ignace. My host spoke 
with characteristic simplicity and deep feeling 
of the poverty of his youth (he came to America 
an immigrant) and of all that America had 
meant to him. He was near the end of his days 
and I have thought often of that evening, of 
his seigniorial dignity and courtesy, of the por- 
trait he so unconsciously drew of himself against 
a background adorned with the rich reward 
of his laborious years. And as he talked it 
seemed that the power of the West, the pro- 
digious energies of its forests and fields and 
hills, its enormous potentialities of opportunity, 
became something concrete and tangible, that 
flowed in an irresistible tide through the heart 
of the nation. 



CHAPTER III 
THE FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 

That it may please Thee to give and preserve to our use the 
kindly fruits of the earth, so that in due time we may enjoy 
them. — The Litany. 

WHEN spring inarches up the Missis- 
sippi valley and the snows of the 
broad plains find companionship with 
the snows of yesteryear, the traveller, journey- 
ing east or west, is aware that life has awakened 
in the fields. The winter wheat lies green upon 
countless acres; thousands of ploughshares turn 
the fertile earth; the farmer, after the enforced 
idleness of winter, is again a man of action. 

Last year (1917), that witnessed our entrance 
into the greatest of wars, the American farmer 
produced 3,159,000,000 bushels of corn, 660,000,- 
000 bushels of wheat, 1,587,000,000 bushels of 
oats, 60,000,000 bushels of rye. From the day 
of our entrance into the world-struggle against 
autocracy the American farm has been the 
subject of a new scrutiny. In all the chancel- 
leries of the world crop reports and estimates 
are eagerly scanned and tabulated, for while 
the war lasts and far into the period of reha- 

83 



84 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

bilitation and reconstruction that will follow, 
America must bear the enormous responsi- 
bility, not merely of training and equipping 
armies, building ships, and manufacturing muni- 
tions, but of feeding the nations. The farmer 
himself is roused to a new consciousness of his 
importance; he is aware that thousands of 
hands are thrust toward him from over the 
sea, that every acre of his soil and every ear 
of corn and bushel of wheat in his bins or in 
process of cultivation has become a factor in 
the gigantic struggle to preserve and widen 
the dominion of democracy. 



"Better be a farmer, son; the corn grows 
while you sleep !" 

This remark, addressed to me in about my 
sixth year by my great-uncle, a farmer in central 
Indiana, lingered long in my memory. There 
was no disputing his philosophy; corn, intel- 
ligently planted and tended, undoubtedly grows 
at night as well as by day. But the choice of 
seed demands judgment, and the preparation 
of the soil and the subsequent care of the grow- 
ing corn exact hard labor. My earliest im- 
pressions of farm life cannot be dissociated 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 85 

from the long, laborious days, the monotonous 
plodding behind the plough, the incidental 
*' chores," the constant apprehensions as to 
drought or flood. The country cousins I visited 
in Indiana and Illinois were all too busy to 
have much time for play. I used to sit on the 
fence or tramp beside the boys as they drove 
the plough, or watch the girls milk the cows or 
ply the churn, oppressed by an overmastering 
homesickness. And when the night shut down 
and the insect chorus floated into the quiet 
house the isolation was intensified. 

My father and his forebears were born and 
bred to the soil; they scratched the earth all 
the way from North Carolina into Kentucky 
and on into Indiana and Illinois. I had just 
returned, last fall, from a visit to the grave of 
my grandfather in a country churchyard in 
central Illinois, round which the corn stood in 
solemn phalanx, when I received a note from 
my fifteen-year-old boy, in whom I had hope- 
fully looked for atavistic tendencies. From 
his school in Connecticut he penned these de- 
pressing tidings: 

''I have decided never to be a farmer. 
Yesterday the school was marched three miles 
to a farm where the boys picked beans all after- 
noon and then walked back. Much as I like 



86 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

beans and want to help Mr. Hoover conserve 
our resources, this was rubbing it in. I never 
want to see a bean again." 

I have heard a score of successful business 
and professional men say that they intended 
to "make farmers" of their boys, and a number 
of these acquaintances have succeeded in send- 
ing their sons through agricultural schools, but 
the great-grandchildren of the Middle Western 
pioneers are not easily persuaded that farming 
is an honorable calling. 

It isn't necessary for gentlemen who watch 
the tape for crop forecasts to be able to dif- 
ferentiate wheat from oats to appreciate the 
importance to the prosperous course of general 
business of a big yield in the grain-fields; but 
to the average urban citizen farming is some- 
thing remote and uninteresting, carried on by 
men he never meets in regions that he only 
observes hastily from a speeding automobile 
or the window of a limited train. Great numbers 
of Middle Western city men indulge in farming 
as a pastime — and in a majority of cases it is, 
from the testimony of these absentee proprietors, 
a pleasant recreation but an expensive one. 
However, all city men who gratify a weakness 
for farming are not faddists; many such land- 
owners manage their plantations with intel- 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 87 

ligence and make them earn dividends. Mr. 
George Ade's Indiana farm, Hazelden, is one 
of the State's show-places. The playwright 
and humorist says that its best feature is a 
good nine-hole golf-course and a swimming- 
pool, but from his "home plant" of 400 acres 
he cultivates 2,000 acres of fertile Hoosier soil. 
A few years ago a manufacturer of my ac- 
quaintance, whose family presents a clear urban 
line for a hundred years, purchased a farm on 
the edge of a river — more, I imagine, for the 
view it afforded of a pleasant valley than be- 
cause of its fertility. An architect entered 
sympathetically into the business of making 
habitable a century-old log house, a transition 
effected without disturbing any of the timbers 
or the irregular lines of floors and ceilings. So 
much time was spent in these restorations and 
readjustments that the busy owner in despair 
fell upon a mail-order catalogue to complete 
his preparations for occupancy. A barn, tenant's 
house, poultry -house, pump and windmill, fenc- 
ing, and every vehicle and tool needed on the 
place, including a barometer and wind-gauge, 
he ordered by post. His joy in his acres was 
second only to his satisfaction in the ease with 
which he invoked all the apparatus necessary 
to his comfort. Every item arrived exactly 



88 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

as the catalogue promised; with the hired man's 
assistance he fitted the houses together and 
built a tower for the windmill out of concrete 
made in a machine provided by the same estab- 
lishment. His only complaint was that the 
catalogue didn't offer memorial tablets, as he 
thought it incumbent upon him to pubhsh in 
brass the merits of the obscure pioneer who 
had laboriously fashioned his cabin before the 
convenient method of post-card ordering had 
been discovered. 



II 



Imaginative literature has done little to in- 
vest the farm with glamour. The sailor and 
the warrior, the fisherman and the hunter are 
celebrated in song and story, but the farmer 
has inspired no ringing saga or iliad, and the 
lyric muse has only added to the general joyless 
impression of the husbandman's life. Hesiod 
and Virgil wrote with knowledge of farming; 
Virgil's instructions to the ploughman only 
need to be hitched to a tractor to bring them 
up to date, and he was an authority on weather 
signs. But Horace was no farmer; the Sabine 
farm is a joke. The best Gray could do for 
the farmer was to send him homeward plodding 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 89 

his weary way. Burns, at the plough, apos- 
trophized the daisy, but only by indirection 
did he celebrate the joys of farm life. Words- 
worth's "Solitary Reaper" sang a melancholy 
strain; "Snow-Bound" offers a genial picture, 
but it is of winter-clad fields. Carleton's "Farm 
Ballads" sing of poverty and domestic infelicity. 
Riley made a philosopher and optimist of his 
Indiana farmer, but his characters are to be 
taken as individuals rather than as types. There 
is, I suppose, in every Middle Western county 
a quizzical, quaint countryman whose sayings 
are quoted among his neighbors, but the man 
with a hundred acres of land to till, wood to 
cut, and stock to feed is not greatly given to 
poetry or humor. 

English novels of rural life are numerous 
but they are usually in a low key. I have a 
lingering memory of Hardy's " Woodlanders " 
as a book of charm, and his tragic "Tess" is 
probably fiction's highest venture in this field. 
"Lorna Doone" I remember chiefly because 
it established in me a distaste for mutton. 
George Eliot and George Meredith are other 
English novelists who have written of farm 
life, nor may I forget Mr. Eden Phillpotts. 
French fiction, of course, offers brilliant ex- 
ceptions to the generalization that literature 



90 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

has neglected the farmer; but, in spite of the 
vast importance of the farm in American Hfe, 
there is in our fiction no farm novel of distinc- 
tion. Mr. Hamlin Garland, in "Main Traveled 
Roads" and in his autobiographical chronicle 
*'A Son of the Middle Border," has thrust his 
plough deep; but the truth as we know it to 
be disclosed in these instances is not hearten- 
ing. The cowboy is the jolKest figure in our 
fiction, the farmer the dreariest. The shepherd 
and the herdsman have fared better in all litera- 
tures than the farmer, perhaps because their 
vocations are more leisurely and offer oppor- 
tunities for contemplation denied the tiller of 
the soil. The Hebrew prophets and poets were 
mindful of the pictorial and illustrative values 
of herd and flock. It is written, "Our cattle 
also shall go with us," and, journeying across 
the mountain States, where there is always a 
herd blurring the range, one thinks inevitably 
of man's long migration in quest of the Promised 
Land. 

The French peasant has his place in art, but 
here again we are confronted by joylessness, 
though I confess that I am resting my case 
chiefly upon Millet. What Remington did for 
the American cattle-range no one has done for 
the farm. Fields of corn and wheat are painted 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 91 

truthfully and effectively, but the critics have 
withheld their highest praise from these per- 
formances. Perhaps a corn-field is not a proper 
subject for the painter; or it may be that the 
Maine rocks or a group of birches against a 
Vermont hillside ''compose" better or are sup- 
ported by a nobler tradition. The most alluring 
pictures I recall of farm life have been advertise- 
ments depicting vast fields of wheat through 
which the delighted husbandman drives a reaper 
with all the jauntiness of a king practising for 
a chariot-race. 

I have thus run skippingly through the cata- 
logues of bucolic literature and art to confirm 
my impression as a layman that farming is 
not an affair of romance, poetry, or pictures, 
but a business, exacting and difficult, that may 
be followed with success only by industrious 
and enlightened practitioners. The first settlers 
of the Mississippi valley stand out rather more 
attractively than their successors of what I 
shall call the intermediate period. There was 
no turning back for the pioneers who struck 
boldly into the unknown, knowing that if they 
failed to establish themselves and solve the 
problem of subsisting from the virgin earth 
they would perish. The battle was to the strong, 
the inteUigent, the resourceful. The first years 



92 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

on a new farm in wilderness or prairie were a 
prolonged contest between man and nature, 
nature being as much a foe as an ally. That the 
social spark survived amid arduous labor and 
daily self-sacrifice is remarkable; that the earth 
was subdued to man's will and made to yield 
him its kindly fruits is a tribute to the splendid 
courage and indomitable faith of the settlers. 

These Middle Western pioneers were in the 
fullest sense the sons of democracy. The 
Southern planter with the traditions of the 
English country gentleman behind him and, 
in slavery time, representing a survival of the 
feudal order, had no counterpart in the West, 
where the settler was limited in his holdings to 
the number of acres that he and his sons could 
cultivate by their own labor. I explored, last 
year, much of the Valley of Democracy, both 
in seed-time and in harvest. We had been 
drawn at last into the world war, and its de- 
mands and conjectures as to its outcome were 
upon the lips of men everywhere. It was im- 
possible to avoid reflecting upon the part these 
plains have played in the history of America 
and the increasing part they are destined to 
play in the world history of the future. Every 
wheat shoot, every stalk of corn was a new 
testimony to the glory of America. Not an 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 93 

acre of land but had been won by intrepid 
pioneers who severed all ties but those that 
bound them to an ideal, whose only tangible 
expression was the log court-house where they 
recorded the deeds for their land or the mili- 
tary post that afforded them protection. At 
Decatur, Illinois, one of these first court-houses 
still stands, and we are told that within its walls 
Lincoln often pleaded causes. American de- 
mocracy could have no finer monument than 
this; the imagination quickens at the thought of 
similar huts reared by the axes of the pioneers 
to establish safeguards of law and order on 
new soil almost before they had fashioned their 
habitations. It seemed to me that if the Kaiser 
had known the spirit in which these august 
fields were tamed and peopled, or the aspira- 
tions, the aims and hopes that are represented 
in every farmhouse and ranch-house between 
the Alleghanies and the Rockies, he would not so 
contemptuously have courted our participation 
against him in his war for world-domination. 

What I am calling, for convenience, the in- 
termediate period in the history of the Missis- 
sippi valley, began when the rough pioneering 
was over, and the sons of the first settlers came 
into an inheritance of cleared land. In the 
Ohio valley the Civil War found the farmer at 



94 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

ease; to the west and northwest we must set 
the date further along. The conditions of this 
intermediate period may not be overlooked in 
any scrutiny of the farmer of these changed 
and changing times. When the cloud of the 
Civil War lifted and the West began asserting 
itseK in the industrial world, the farmer, view- 
ing the smoke-stacks that advertised the en- 
trance of the nearest towns and cities into manu- 
facturing, became a man with a grievance, who 
bitterly reflected that when rumors of ''good 
times" reached him he saw no perceptible change 
in his own fortunes or prospects, and in "bad 
times" he felt himself the victim of hardship 
and injustice. The glory of pioneering had 
passed with his father and grandfather; they 
had departed, leaving him without their in- 
centive of urgent necessity or the exultance of 
conquest. There may have been some weaken- 
ing of the fibre, or perhaps it was only a lessening 
of the tension now that the Indians had been 
dispersed and the fear of wild beasts lifted from 
his household. 

There were always, of course, men who were 
pointed to as prosperous, who for one reason 
or another "got ahead" when others fell be- 
hind. They not only held their acres free of 
mortgage but added to their holdings. These 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 95 

men were very often spoken of as "close," or 
tight-fisted; in Mr. Brand Whitlock's phrase 
they were "not rich, but they had money." 
And, having money and credit, they were sharply 
differentiated from their neighbors who were 
forever borrowing to cover a shortage. These 
men loomed prominently in their counties; 
they took pride in augmenting the farms in- 
herited from pioneer fathers; they might sit 
in the State legislature or even in the national 
Congress. But for many years the farmer was 
firmly established in the mind of the rest of the 
world as an object of commiseration. He oc- 
cupied an anomalous position in the industrial 
economy. He was a landowner without en- 
joying the dignity of a capitaKst; he performed 
the most arduous tasks without recognition by 
organized labor. He was shabby, dull, and 
uninteresting. He drove to town over a bad 
road with a load of corn, and, after selling or 
bartering it, negotiated for the renewal of his 
mortgage and stood on the street corner, an 
unheroic figure, until it was time to drive home. 
He symbolized hard work, hard luck, and dis- 
couragement. The saloon, the livery-stable, 
and the grocery where he did his trading were 
his only loafing-places. The hotel was inhos- 
pitable; he spent no money there and the pro- 



96 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

prietor didn't want ** rubes" or **jays" hanging 
about. The farmer and his wife ate their mid- 
day meal in the farm-wagon or at a restaurant 
on the "'square" where the frugal patronage 
of farm folk was not despised. 

The type I am describing was often wasteful 
and improvident. The fact that a degree of 
mechanical skill was required for the care of 
farm-machinery added to his perplexities; and 
this apparatus he very likely left out-of-doors 
all winter for lack of initiative to build a shed 
to house it. I used to pass frequently a farm 
where a series of reapers in various stages of 
decrepitude decorated the barn-lot, with al- 
ways a new one to heighten the contrast. 

The social life of the farmer centred chiefly 
in the church, where on the Sabbath day he 
met his neighbors and compared notes with 
them on the state of the crops. Sundays on 
the farm I recall as days of gloom that brought 
an intensification of week-day homesickness. 
The road was dusty; the church was hot; the 
hymns were dolorously sung to the accompani- 
ment of a wheezy organ; the sermon was long, 
strongly flavored with brimstone, and did 
nothing to lighten 

"the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world.** 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 97 

The horses outside stamped noisily in their 
efforts to shake off the flies. A venturous bee 
might invade the sanctuary and arouse hope 
in impious youngsters of an attack upon the 
parson — a hope never reahzed ! The preacher's 
appetite alone was a matter for humor; I once 
reported a Methodist conference at which the 
succulence of the yellow-legged chickens in a 
number of communities that contended for the 
next convocation was debated for an hour. 
The height of the country boy's ambition was 
to break a colt and own a side-bar buggy in 
which to take a neighbor's daughter for a drive 
on Sunday afternoon. 

Community gatherings were rare; men lived 
and died in the counties where they were born, 
** having seen nothing, still unblest." County 
and State fairs offered annual diversion, and 
the more ambitious farmers displayed their 
hogs and cattle, or mammoth ears of corn, and 
reverently placed their prize ribbons in the 
family Bibles on the centre-tables of their som- 
bre parlors. Cheap side-shows and monstrosi- 
ties, horse-races and balloon ascensions were 
provided for their delectation, as marking the 
ultimate height of their intellectual interests. 
A characteristic "Riley story" was of a farmer 
with a boil on the back of his neck, who spent 



98 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

a day at the State fair waiting for the balloon 
ascension. He inquired repeatedly: "Has the 
balloon gone up yit?" Of course when the 
ascension took place he couldn't lift his head 
to see the balloon, but, satisfied that it really 
had "gone up," he contentedly left for home. 
(It may be noted here that the new status of 
the farmer is marked by an improvement in 
the character of amusements offered by State- 
fair managers. Most of the Western States 
have added creditable exhibitions of paintings 
to their attractions, and in Minnesota these 
were last year the subject of lectures that proved 
to be very popular.) 

The farmer, in the years before he found 
that he must become a scientist and a business 
man to achieve success, was the prey of a great 
variety of sharpers. Tumble-down barns bris- 
tled with lightning-rods that cost more than 
the structures were worth. A man who had 
sold cooking-ranges to farmers once told me of 
the delights of that occupation. A carload of 
ranges would be shipped to a county-seat and 
transferred to wagons. It was the agent's game 
to arrive at the home of a good "prospect" 
shortly before noon, take down the old, ram- 
shackle cook-stove, set up the new and glitter- 
ing range, and assist the womenfolk to prepare 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 99 

a meal. The farmer, coming in from the fields 
and finding his wife enchanted, would order a 
range and sign notes for payment. These ob- 
ligations, after the county had been thoroughly 
exploited, would be discounted at the local bank. 
In this way the farmer's wife got 'a convenient 
range she would never have thought of buying 
in town, and her husband paid an exorbitant 
price for it. 

The farmer's wife was, in this period to which 
I am referring, a poor drudge who appeared at 
the back door of her town customers on Satur- 
day mornings with eggs and butter. She was 
copartner with her husband, but, even though 
she might have "brought" him additional acres 
at marriage, her spending-money was limited 
to the income from butter, eggs, and poultry, 
and even this was dependent upon the gen- 
erosity of the head of the house. Her kitchen 
was furnished with only the crudest house- 
wifery apparatus; labor-saving devices reached 
her slowly. In busy seasons, when there were 
farm-hands to cook for, she might borrow a 
neighbor's daughter to help her. Her only 
relief came when her own daughters grew old 
enough to assist in her labors. She was often 
broken down, a prey to disease, before she 
reached middle life. Her loneliness, the dreary 



100 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

monotony of her existence, the prevaiHng hope- 
lessness of never '* catching up" with her sewing 
and mending, often drove her insane. The 
farmhouse itself was a desolate place. There 
is a mustiness I associate with farmhouses — 
the damp stufEness of places never reached by 
the sun. With all the fresh air in the world to 
draw from, thousands of farmhouses were ill- 
lighted and ill-ventilated, and farm sanitation 
was of the most primitive order. 

I have dwelt upon the intermediate period 
merely to heighten the contrast with the new 
era — an era that finds the problem of farm 
regeneration put squarely up to the farmer. 



Ill 



The new era really began with the passage 
of the Morrill Act, approved July 2, 1862, 
though it is only within a decade that the ef- 
fects of this law upon the efficiency and the 
character of the farmer have been markedly 
evident. The Morrill Act not only made the 
first provision for wide-spread education in 
agriculture but lighted the way for subsequent 
legislation that resulted in the elevation of 
the Department of Agriculture to a cabinet 
bureau, the system of agriculture experiment- 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 101 

stations, the co-operation of federal and State 
bureaus for the diffusion of scientific knowledge 
pertaining to farming and the breeding and 
care of live-stock, and the recent introduction of 
vocational training into country schools. 

It was fitting that Abraham Lincoln, who had 
known the hardest farm labor, should have 
signed a measure of so great importance, that 
opened new possibilities to the American farmer. 
The agricultural colleges established under his 
Act are impressive monuments to Senator Mor- 
rill's far-sightedness. When the first land-grant 
colleges were opened there was little upon which 
to build courses of instruction. Farming was 
not recognized as a science but was a form of 
hard labor based on tradition and varied only 
by reckless experiments that usually resulted in 
failure. The first students of the agricultural 
schools, drawn largely from the farm, were dis- 
couraged by the elementary character of the 
courses. Instruction in ploughing, to young 
men who had learned to turn a straight furrow 
as soon as they could tiptoe up to the plough- 
handles, was not calculated to inspire respect 
for ''book farming" either in students or their 
doubting parents. 

The farmer and his household have found 
themselves in recent years the object of em- 



102 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

barrassing attentions not only from Washing- 
ton, the land-grant colleges, and the experiment- 
stations, but countless private agencies have 
"discovered" the farmer and addressed them- 
selves determinedly to the amelioration of his 
hardships. The social surveyor, having analyzed 
the city slum to his satisfaction, springs from 
his automobile at the farmhouse door and 
asks questions of the bewildered occupants that 
rouse the direst apprehensions. Sanitarians 
invade the premises and recommend the most 
startling changes and improvements. Once it 
was possible for typhoid or diphtheria to ravage 
a household without any interference from the 
outside world; now a health officer is speedily 
on the premises to investigate the old oaken 
bucket, the iron-bound bucket, that hangs in 
the well, and he very likely ties and seals the 
well-sweep and bids the farmer bore a new well, 
in a spot kindly chosen for him, where the barn- 
lot will not pollute his drinking-water. The 
questionnaire, dear to the academic investi- 
gator, is constantly in circulation. Women's 
clubs and federations thereof ponder the plight 
of the farmer's wife and are eager to hitch her 
wagon to a star. Home-mission societies, 
alarmed by reports of the decay of the country 
church, have instituted surveys to determine 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 103 

the truth of this matter. The consolidation of 
schools, the introduction of comfortable omni- 
buses to carry children to and from home, the 
multiplication of country high schools, with a 
^ radical revision of the curriculum, the building 
of two-story schoolhouses in place of the old one- 
room affair in which all branches were taught at 
once, and the use of the schoolhouse as a com- 
munity centre — these changes have dealt a 
blow to the long-established ideal of the red- 
mittened country child, wading breast-high 
through snow to acquaint himself with the three 
R's and, thus fortified, enter into the full enjoy- 
ment of American democracy. Just how Jeffer- 
son would look upon these changes and this be- 
nignant paternalism I do not know, nor does it 
matter now that American farm products are 
reckoned in billions and we are told that the 
amount must be increased or the world will 
starve. 

The farmer's mail, once restricted to an oc- 
casional letter, began to be augmented by other 
remembrances from Washington than the holly- 
hock-seed his congressman occasionally con- 
ferred upon the farmer's wife. Pamphlets in 
great numbers poured in upon him, filled with 
warnings and friendly counsel. The soil he 
had sown and reaped for years, in the full con- 



104 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

fidence that he knew all its weaknesses and 
possibilities, he found to be something very 
different and called by strange names. His 
lifelong submission to destructive worms and 
hoppers was, he learned, unnecessary if not 
criminal; there were ways of eliminating these 
enemies, and he shyly discussed the subject 
with his neighbors. 

In speaking of the farmer's shyness I have 
stumbled into the field of psychology, whose 
pitfalls are many. The psychologists have as 
yet played their search-light upon the farm 
guardedly or from the sociologist's camp. I 
here condense a few impressions merely that 
the trained specialist may hasten to convict me 
of error. The farmer of the Middle West — the 
typical farmer with approximately a quarter- 
section of land — is notably sensitive, timid, 
only mildly curious, cautious, and enormously 
suspicious. ("The farmer," a Kansas friend 
whispers, ''doesn't vote his opinions; he votes 
his suspicions !") In spite of the stuffing of his 
rural-route box with instructive literature de- 
signed to increase the productiveness of his 
acres and lighten his own toil, he met the first 
overtures of the ''book-l'arnin' " specialist 
warily, and often with open hostility. The 
reluctant earth has communicated to the farmer. 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 105 

perhaps in all times and in all lands, something 
of its own stubbornness. He does not like to 
be driven; he is restive under criticism. The 
county agent of the extension bureau who seeks 
him out with the best intentions in the world, 
to counsel him in his perplexities, must ap- 
proach him diplomatically. I find in the re- 
port of a State director of agricultural exten- 
sion a discreet statement that *'the forces of 
this department are organized, not for purposes 
of dictation in agricultural matters but for 
service and assistance in working out problems 
pertaining to the farm and the community." 
The farmer, unaffected as he is by crowd psy- 
chology, is not easily disturbed by the great 
movements and tremendous crises that rouse 
the urban citizen. He reads his newspaper 
perhaps more thoroughly than the city man, 
at least in the winter season when the distrac- 
tions of the city are greatest and farm duties 
are the least exacting. Surrounded by the 
peace of the fields, he is not swayed by mighty 
events, as men are who scan the day's news on 
trains and trolleys and catch the hurried com- 
ments of their fellow citizens as they plunge 
through jostling throngs. Professor C. J. Gal- 
pin, of Wisconsin University, aptly observes 
that, while the farmer trades in a village, he 



106 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

shares the invisible government of a township, 
which "scatters and mystifies" his community 
sense. 

It was a matter of serious complaint that 
farmers responded very slowly in the first 
Liberty Loan campaigns. At the second call 
vigorous attempts were made through the corn 
belt to rouse the farmer, who had profited so 
enormously by the war's augmentation of prices. 
In many cases country banks took the minimum 
allotment of their communities and then sent 
for the farmers to come in and subscribe. The 
Third Loan, however, was met in a much better 
spirit. The farmer is unused to the methods 
by which money-raising "drives" are conducted 
and he resents being told that he must do this, 
that, or the other thing. Townfolk are beset 
constantly by demands for money for innumer- 
able causes; there is always a church, a hos- 
pital, a social-service house, a Y. M. C. A. build- 
ing, or some home or refuge for which a special 
appeal is being made. There is a distinct psy- 
chology of generosity based largely on the in- 
spiration of thoroughly organized effort, where 
teams set forth with a definite quota to "raise" 
before a fixed hour, but the farmer was long 
immune from these influences. 

In marked contrast with the small farmer. 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 107 

who wrests a scant livelihood from the soil, is 
his neighbor who boasts a section or a thousand 
acres, who is able to utilize the newest ma- 
chinery and to avail himself of the latest dis- 
closures of the laboratories, to increase his 
profits. One visits these large farms with ad- 
miration for the fruitful land, the perfect equip- 
ment, the efficient method, and the alert, wide- 
awake owner. He lives in a comfortable house, 
often electric-lighted and "plumbed," visits the 
cities, attends farm conferences, and is keenly 
alive to the trend of public affairs. If the frost 
nips his corn he is aware of every means by 
which "soft" corn may be handled to the best 
advantage. He knows how many cattle and 
hogs his own acres will feed, and is ready with 
cash to buy his neighbors' corn and feed it to 
stock he buys at just the right turn of the 
market. It is possible for a man to support 
himseK and a family on eighty acres; I have 
talked with men who have done this; but they 
"just about get by." The owner of a big farm, 
whose modern house and rich demesne are ad- 
mired by the traveller, is a valued customer of 
a town or city banker; the important men of 
his State cultivate his acquaintance, with re- 
sulting benefits in a broader outlook than his 
less-favored neighbors enjoy. Farmers of this 



108 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

class are themselves usually money-lenders or 
shareholders in country banks, and they watch 
the trend of affairs from the view-point of the 
urban business man. They live closer to the 
world's currents and are more accessible and 
responsive to appeals of every sort than their 
less-favored brethren. 

But it is the small farmer, the man with the 
quarter-section or less, who is the special focus 
of the search-light of educator, scientist, and 
sociologist. During what I have called the in- 
termediate period — the winter of the farmer's 
discontent — the politicians did not wholly ig- 
nore him. The demagogue went forth in every 
campaign with special appeals to the honest 
husbandman, with the unhappy effect of driv- 
ing the farmer more closely into himself and 
strengthening his class sense. For the reason 
that the security of a democracy rests upon 
the effacement to the vanishing-point of class 
feeling, and the establishment of a solidarity 
of interests based upon a common aim and 
aspiration, the effort making to dignify farm- 
ing as a calling and quicken the social instincts 
of the farmer's household are matters of na- 
tional importance. 

It may be said that in no other business is 
there a mechanism so thoroughly organized 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 109 

for guarding the investor from errors of omis- 
sion or commission. I am aware of no ''ser- 
vice" in any other field of endeavor so excel- 
lent as that of the agricultural colleges and their 
auxiliary experiment and extension branches, 
and it is a pleasure to testify to the ease with 
which information touching the farm in all 
its departments may be collected. Only the 
obtuse may fail these days to profit by the 
newest ideas in soil-conservation, plant-nutri- 
tion, animal-husbandry, and a thousand other 
subjects of vital importance to the farmer. To 
test the "service" I wrote to the Department 
of Agriculture for information touching a number 
of subjects in which my ignorance was profound. 
The return mail brought an astonishing array 
of documents covering all my inquiries and 
other literature which my naive questions had 
suggested to the Department as likely to prove 
illuminative. As the extent of the govern- 
ment's aid to the farmer and stockman is known 
only vaguely to most laymen, I shall set down 
the titles of some of these publications: 

"Management of Sandy Land Farms in Northern In- 
diana and Southern Michigan.'* 

"The Feeding of Grain Sorghums to Live Stock." 

"Prevention of Losses of Live Stock from Plant Poi- 
soning/' 

"The Feeding of Dairy Cows."" 



no THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

"An Economic Study of the Farm Tractor in the Corn 
Belt." 

"Waste Land and Wasted Land on Farms." 

"How to Grow an Acre of Corn." 

"How to Select a Sound Horse." 

"The Chalcis Fly in Alfalfa Seed." 

"Homemade Fireless Cookers and Their Use." 

"A Method of Analyzing the Farm Business." 

"The Striped Peach Worm." 

"The Sheep-KiUing Dog." 

"Food Habits of the Swallows, a Family of Valuable 
Native Birds." 



As most of these bulletins may be had free 
and for others only a nominal price of five or 
ten cents is charged, it is possible to accumulate 
an extensive library with a very small expen- 
diture. Soil-fertilization alone is the subject 
of an enormous literature; the field investigator 
and the laboratory expert have subjected the 
earth in every part of America to intensive 
study and their reports are presented clearly 
and with a minimum use of technical terms. 
Many manufacturers of implements or ma- 
terials used on farms pubhsh and distribute 
books of real dignity in the advertisement of 
their wares. I have before me a handsome 
volume, elaborately illustrated, put forth by 
a Wisconsin concern, describing the proper 
method of constructing and equipping a dairy - 
barn. To peruse this work is to be convinced 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 111 

that the manger so alluringly offered really 
assures the greatest economy of feeding, and 
the kine are so effectively photographed, so 
clean, and so contented that one is impelled 
to an immediate investment in a herd merely 
for the joy of housing it in the attractive manner 
recommended by the sagacious advertiser. 

Agricultural schools and State extension bu- 
reaus manifest the greatest eagerness to serve 
the earnest seeker for enlightenment. ''The 
Service of YOUR College Brought as Near as 
Your Mail-Box," is the slogan of the Kansas 
State Agricultural College. Once upon a time 
I sought the answer to a problem in Egyptian 
hieroglyphics and learned that the only Amer- 
ican who could speak authoritatively on that 
particular point was somewhere on the Nile 
with an exploration party. In the field of agri- 
culture there is no such paucity of scholarship. 
The very stupidity of a question seems to awaken 
pity in the intelligent, accommodating persons 
who are laboring in the farmer's behalf. Au- 
gustine Birrell remarks that in the days of the 
tractarian movement pamphlets were served 
upon the innocent bystander like sheriffs' proc- 
esses. In like manner one who manifests only 
the tamest curiosity touching agriculture in 
any of its phases will find literature pouring in 



112 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

upon him; and he is distressed to find that it 
is all so charmingly presented that he is be- 
guiled into reading it ! 

The charge that the agricultural school Is 
educating students away from the farm is not 
substantiated by reports from representative 
institutions of this character. The dean of 
the College of Agriculture of the University of 
Illinois, Dr. Eugene Davenport, has prepared 
a statement illustrative of the sources from 
which the students of that institution are de- 
rived. Every county except two is represented 
in the agricultural department in a registration 
of 1,200 students, and, of 710 questioned, 242 
are from farms; 40 from towns under 1,000; 
87 from towns of 1,000 to 1,500; 262 from towns 
of 5,000 and up; and 79 from Chicago. Since 
1900 nearly 1,000 students have completed the 
agricultural course in this institution, and of this 
number 69 per cent are actually living on farms 
and engaged in farming; 17 per cent are teach- 
ing agriculture, or are engaged in extension work; 
10 per cent entered callings related to farming, 
such as veterinary surgery, landscape-garden- 
ing, creamery -management, etc. ; less than 4 per 
cent are in occupations not alhed with agricul- 
ture. It should be explained that the Illinois 
school had only a nominal existence until seven- 
teen years ago. The number of students has 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 113 

steadily increased from 7 registrations in 1890 
to 1,201 in 1916-17. At the Ohio College of 
Agriculture half the freshman classes of the last 
three years came from the cities, though this 
includes students in landscape architecture and 
horticulture. In Iowa State College the reports 
of three years show that 54.5 per cent of the 
freshmen were sons of farmers, and of the gradu- 
ates of a seven-year period (1907-1914) 34.8 are 
now engaged in farming. 

The opportunities open to the graduates of 
these colleges have been greatly multiplied by 
the demand for teachers in vocational schools, 
and the employment of county agents who 
must be graduates of a school of agriculture or 
have had the equivalent in practical farm ex- 
perience. The influence of the educated farmer 
upon his neighbors is very marked. They may 
view his methods with distrust, but when he 
rolls up a yield of corn that sets a new record 
for fields with which they are familiar they 
cannot ignore the fact that, after all, there may 
be something in the idea of school-taught farm- 
ing. By the time a farm boy enters college he 
is sufliciently schooled in his father's methods, 
and well enough acquainted with the home 
acres, to appreciate fully the value of the in- 
struction the college offers him. 

The only diflPerence between agricultural 



114 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

colleges and other technical schools is that to 
an unscientific observer the courses in agronomy 
and its co-ordinate branches deal with vital 
matters that are more interesting and appeal- 
ing than those in, let us say, mechanical en- 
gineering. If there is something that stirs the 
imagination in the thought that two blades of 
grass may be made to grow where only one 
had grown before, how much more satisfying 
is the assurance that an acre of soil, properly 
fertihzed and thoroughly tended, may double 
its yield of corn; that there is a choice well 
worth the knowing between breeds of beef or 
dairy cattle, and that there is a demonstrable 
difference in the energy of foods that may be 
converted into pork, particularly when there is 
a shortage and the government, to stimulate 
hog production, fixes a minimum price (Novem- 
ber, 1917) of $15.50 per hundredweight in the 
Chicago market; and even so stabilized the 
price is close upon $20 in July, 1918. 

The equipment of these institutions includes, 
with the essential laboratories, farms under cul- 
tivation, horses, cattle, sheep, and swine of all 
the representative breeds. Last fall I spent 
two days in the agricultural school of a typical 
land-grant college of the corn belt (Purdue Uni- 
versity), and found the experience wholly edi- 










Students of agriculture in the pageant that celebrated the fortieth 
anniversary of the founding of Ohio State University. 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 115 

fying. The value of this school to the State of 
Indiana is incalculable. Here the co-ordinate 
extension service under Professor G. I. Christie 
is thoroughly systematized, and reaches every 
acre of land in the commonwealth. *'Send for 
Christie" has become a watchword among 
Indiana farmers in hours of doubt or peril. 
Christie can diagnose an individual farmer's 
troubles in the midst of a stubborn field, and 
fully satisfy the landowner as to the merit of 
the prescribed remedy; or he can interest a 
fashionable city audience in farm problems. 
He was summoned to Washington a year ago 
to supervise farm-labor activities, and is a mem- 
ber of the recently organized war policies board.* 
The extension service in all the corn and wheat 
States is excellent; it must be in capable hands, 
for the farmer at once becomes suspicious if the 
State agent doesn't show immediately that he 
knows his business. 

The students at Purdue struck me as more 
attentive and alert than those I have observed 
from time to time in literature classes of schools 
that stick to the humanities. In an entomol- 
ogy class, where I noted the presence of one 
young woman, attention was riveted upon 
a certain malevolent grasshopper, the foe of 
vegetation and in these years of anxious con- 

* Now the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. 



116 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

servation an enemy of civilization. That a 
young woman should elect a full course in 
agronomy and allied branches seemed to me 
highly interesting, and, to learn her habitat in 
the most delicate manner possible, I asked for 
a census of the class, to determine how many 
students were of farm origin. The young lady 
so deeply absorbed in the grasshopper was, I 
found, a city girl. Women, it should be noted, 
are often very successful farmers and stock-breed- 
ers. They may be seen at all representative 
cattle-shows inspecting the exhibits with sophis- 
tication and pencilling notes in the catalogues. 

To sit in the pavilion of one of these colleges 
and hear a lecture on the judging of cattle is 
to be persuaded that much philosophy goes 
into the production of a tender, juicy beefsteak 
or a sound, productive milch cow. In a class 
that I visited a Polled Angus steer and a short- 
horn were on exhibition; the instructor might 
have been a sculptor, conducting a class in 
modelling, from the nice points of "line," the 
distribution of muscle and fat, that he dilated 
upon. He invited questions, which led to a 
discussion in which the whole class participated. 
At the conclusion of this lecture a drove of 
swine was driven in that a number of young 
gentlemen might practise the fine art of "judg- 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 117 

ing" this species against an approaching com- 
petitive meeting with a class from another 
school. In these days of multiplying farm-im- 
plements and tractors, the farmer is driven per- 
force to know something of mechanics. Time is 
precious and the breaking down of a harvester 
may be calamitous if the owner must send to 
town for some one to repair it. These matters 
are cared for in the farm-mechanics laboratories 
where instruction is offered in the care, adjust- 
ment, and repair of all kinds of farm-machinery. 
While in the summer of 1917 only 40,000 trac- 
tors were in use on American farms, it is esti- 
mated that by the end of the current year the 
number will have increased to 200,000, greatly 
minimizing the shortage in men and horses. 
The substitution of gasolene for horse-power is 
only one of the many changes in farm methods 
attributable to the imperative demand for 
increased production of foodstuffs. Whitman 
may have foreseen the coming of the tractor 
when he wrote: 

** Well-pleased America, thou beholdest. 
Over the fields of the West those crawling monsters; 
The human-divine inventions, the labor-saving imple- 
ments"; 

for ''crawling monster" happily describes the 
tractor. 



118 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

The anxiety to serve, to accommodate the 
instruction to special needs, is illustrated in 
the length of courses offered, which include a 
week's intensive course in midwinter designed 
for farmers, two-year and four-year courses, 
and postgraduate work. Men well advanced 
in years attend the midwinter sessions, eager 
to improve their methods in a business they 
have followed all their lives. They often bring 
their wives with them, to attend classes in dairy- 
ing, poultry-raising, or home economics. It is 
significant of the new movement in farming 
that at the University of Wisconsin, an insti- 
tution whose services to American agriculture 
are inestimable, there is a course in agricultural 
journalism, ''intended," the catalogue recites, 
"to be of special service to students who will 
engage in farming or who expect to be employed 
in station work or in some form of demonstra- 
tion or extension service and who therefore may 
have occasion to write for publication and cer- 
tainly will have farm produce and products 
to sell. To these ends the work is very largely 
confined to studies in agricultural writing." 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 119 

IV 

The easing of the farmer's burdens, through 
the development of labor-saving machinery, 
and the convenience of telephones, trolley-lines, 
and the cheap automobile that have vastly 
improved his social prospects, has not over- 
come a growing prejudice against close kinship 
with the soil. We have still to deal with the 
loneliness and the social barrenness that have 
driven thousands of the children of farms to 
the cities. The son of a small farmer may make 
a brilliant record in an agricultural college, 
achieve the distinction of admission to the 
national honorary agricultural fraternity (the 
Alpha Zeta, the little brother of the Phi Beta 
Kappa), and still find the old home crippling 
and stifling to his awakened social sense. 

There is general agreement among the au- 
thorities that one of the chief difiiculties in 
the way of improvement is the lack of leader- 
ship in farm communities. The farmer is not 
easily aroused, and he is disposed to resent as 
an unwarranted infringement upon his con- 
stitutional rights the attempts of outsiders to 
meddle with his domestic affairs. He has found 
that it is profitable to attend institutes, consult 
county agents, and peruse the literature dis- 



120 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

tributed from extension centres, but the in- 
vasion of his house is a very different matter. 
Is he not the lord of his acres, an independent, 
self-respecting citizen, asking no favors of so- 
ciety? Does he not ponder well his civic duty 
and plot the destruction of the accursed middle* 
man, his arch-enemy? The benevolently in- 
clined who seek him out to persuade him of 
the error of his ways in any particular are often 
received with scant courtesy. He must be 
*' shown," not merely *'told." The agencies 
now so diligently at work to improve the farmer's 
social status understand this and the methods 
employed are wisely tempered in the Kght of 
abundant knowledge of just how much crowd- 
ing the farmer will stand. 

Nothing is so essential to his success as the 
health of his household; yet inquiries, more 
particularly in the older States of the Missis- 
sippi valley, lead to the conclusion that there 
is a dismaying amount of chronic invalidism on 
farms. A physician who is very familiar with 
farm life declares that ''all farmers have stomach 
trouble," and this obvious exaggeration is rather 
supported by Dr. John N. Hurty, secretary of 
the Indiana State Board of Health, who says 
that he finds in his visits to farmhouses that 
the cupboards are filled with nostrums war- 



^iS5 







A feeding-plant at "Whitehall," the farm of Edwin S. Kelly, 
Springfield, Ohio. 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 121 

ranted to relieve the agonies of poor digestion. 
Dr. Hurty, who has probably saved more lives 
and caused more indignation in his twenty 
years of public service than any other Hoosier, 
has made a sanitary survey of four widely sep- 
arated Indiana counties. In Blackford County, 
where 1,374 properties were inspected, only 15 
per cent of the farm-houses were found to be 
sanitary. Site, ventilation, water-supply, the 
condition of the house, and the health of its 
inmates entered into the scoring. In Ohio 
County, where 441 homes were visited, 86 per 
cent were found to be insanitary. The tuber- 
culosis rate for this county was found to be 25 
per cent higher than that of the State. In 
Scott County 97.6 per cent of the farms were 
pronounced insanitary, and here the tuberculo- 
sis rate is 48.3 per cent higher than that of the 
State. In Union County, where only 2.3 per 
cent of the farms were found to be sanitary, the 
average score did not rise above 45 per cent on 
site, ventilation, and health. Here the tuber- 
culosis death-rate was 176.3 in 100,000, against 
the State rate of 157. In all these counties the 
school population showed a decrease. 

It should be said that in the communities 
mentioned, old ones as history runs in this 
region, many homes stand practically unaltered 



122 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

after fifty or seventy-five years of continuous 
occupancy. Thousands of farmers who would 
think it a shameless extravagance to install a 
bathtub boast an automobile. A survey by 
Professor George H. von Tungeln, of Iowa 
College, of 227 farms in two townships of 
northern Iowa, disclosed 62 bathtubs, 98 
pianos, and 124 automobiles. The number of 
bathtubs reported by the farmers of Ohio is 
so small that I shrink from stating it. 

Here, again, we may be sure that the farmer 
is not allowed to dwell in slothful indifference 
to the perils of uncleanliness. On the heels of 
the sanitarian and the sociologist come the 
field agents of the home-economics depart- 
ments of the meddlesome land-grant colleges, 
bent upon showing him a better way of life. 
I was pondering the plight of the bathless farm- 
house when a document reached me showing 
how a farmhouse may enjoy running water, 
bathroom, gas, furnace, and two fireplaces for 
an expenditure of $723.97. One concrete story 
is better than many treatises, and I cheerfully 
cite, as my authority, "Modernizing an Old 
Farm House," by Mrs. F. F. Showers, included 
among the publications of the Wisconsin Col- 
lege of Agriculture. The home-economics de- 
partments do not wait for the daughters of 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 123 

the farm to come to them, but seek them out 
with the glad tidings that greater ease and com- 
fort are within their reach if only their fathers 
can be made to see the light. In many States 
the extension agents organize companies of 
countrywomen and carry them junketing to 
modern farmhouses. 

Turning to Nebraska, whose roUing corn- 
fields are among the noblest to be encountered 
anywhere, home-demonstration agents range 
the commonwealth organizing clubs, which are 
federated where possible to widen social con- 
tacts, better-babies conferences, and child-wel- 
fare exhibits. The Community Welfare As- 
sembly, as conducted in Kansas, has the merit 
of offering a varied programme — lectures on 
agriculture and home economics, civics, health, 
and rural education by specialists, moving pic- 
tures, community music, and folk games and 
stories for the children. In Wisconsin the rural- 
club movement reaches every part of the State, 
and a State law grants the use of schoolhouses 
for community gatherings. Seymour, Indiana, 
boasts a Farmer's Club, the gift of a citizen, 
with a comfortably appointed house, where 
farmers and their families may take their ease 
when in town. 

The organization of boys' and girls' clubs 



124 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

among farm youth is a feature of the vocational- 
training service offered under the Smith-Lever 
Act of 1914, and already the reports of its prog- 
ress are highly interesting. These organiza- 
tions make possible the immediate application 
of the instruction in agriculture and home eco- 
nomics received in the schools. In Indiana 
more than 25,000 boys and girls were enhsted 
last year in such club projects as the cultivation 
of corn, potatoes, and garden vegetables, can- 
ning, sewing, and home-craft, and the net profit 
from these sources was $105,100. In my prowl- 
ings nothing has delighted me more than the 
discovery of the Pig Club. This is one of Uncle 
Sam's many schemes for developing the initia- 
tive and stimulating the ambition of farm chil- 
dren. It might occur to the city boy, whose ac- 
quaintance with pork is limited to his breakfast 
bacon, that the feeding of a pig is not a matter 
worthy of the consideration of youth of intel- 
hgence and aspiration. Uncle Sam, however, 
holds the contrary opinion. From a desk in 
the Department of Agriculture he has thrown 
a rosy glamour about the lowly pig. Country 
bankers, properly approached and satisfied of 
the good character and honorable intentions 
of applicants, will advance money to farm boys 
to launch them upon pig-feeding careers. Mj 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 125 

heart warms to Douglas Byrne, of Harrison 
County, Indiana, who, under the guidance of a 
club supervisor, fed 17 hogs with a profit of 
$99.30. Another young Hoosier, Elmer Pearce, 
of Vanderburgh County, fed 2 pigs that made a 
daily gain of 1.38 pounds for four months, and 
sold them at a profit of $12.36. We learn from 
the official report that this young man's father 
warned him that the hogs he exercised his tal- 
ents upon would make no such gains as were 
achieved. Instead of spanking the lad for his 
perverseness, as would have been the case in 
the olden golden days, this father made him the 
ruler over 30 swine. There are calf and pig 
clubs for girls, and a record has been set for 
Indiana by twelve-year-old Pauline Hadley, of 
Mooresville, who cared for a Poland China hog 
for 110 days, increasing its weight from 65 to 
256 pounds, and sold it at a profit of $20.08. 

The farmer of yesterday blundered through 
a year and at the end had a very imperfect idea 
of his profits and losses. He kept no accounts; 
if he paid his taxes and the interest on the omni- 
present mortgage, and estabhshed credit for 
the winter with his grocer, he was satisfied. 
Uncle Sam, thoroughly aroused to the impor- 
tance of increasing the farmer's efficiency, now 
shows him how to keep simple accounts and 



126 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

returns at the end of the season to analyze 
the results. (Farm-management is the subject 
of many beguihng pamphlets; it seems in- 
credible that any farmer should bhndly go on 
wasting time and money when his every weak- 
ness is anticipated and prescribed for by the 
Department of Agriculture and its great army 
of investigators and counsellors !) 

If there is little cheerful fiction dealing with 
farm life, its absence is compensated for by the 
abundance of "true stories" of the most stim- 
ulating character, to be found in the publica- 
tions of the State agricultural extension bu- 
reaus. Professor Christie's report of the Indiana 
Extension Service for last year recites the re- 
sult of three years' observation of a southern 
Indiana farm of 213 acres. In 1914 the owner 
cleared $427 above interest on his capital, in 
addition to his living. This, however, was 
better than the average for the community, 
which was a cash return of $153. This man 
had nearly twice as much land as his neighbors, 
carried more live-stock, and his crop yields 
were twice as great as the community average. 
His attention was called to the fact that he 
was investing $100 worth of feed and getting 
back only $82 in his live-stock account. He 
was expending 780 days in the care of his farm 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 127 

and stock, which the average corn-belt farmer 
could have managed with 605 days of labor. 
Acting on the advice of the Extension Depart- 
ment, he added to his live-stock, built a silo, 
changed his feeding ration, and increased his 
live-stock receipts to $154 per $100 of feed. 
The care of the additional live-stock through 
the winter resulted in a better reward for his 
labor and the amount accredited to labor in- 
come for the year was $1,505. The third year 
he increased his live-stock and poultry, further 
improved the feeding ration, and received $205 
per $100 of feed. By adding to the conveniences 
of his barn, he was able to cut down his expen- 
diture for hired labor; or, to give the exact 
figures, he reduced the amount expended in 
this way from $515 to $175. His labor income 
for the third year was $3,451. "Labor income," 
as the phrase is employed in farm bookkeeping, 
is the net sum remaining after the farm-owner 
has paid all business expenses of the farm and 
deducted a fair interest on the amount invested 
in his plant. 

I have mentioned the 80-acre farm as aflford- 
ing a living for a family; but there is no ignoring 
the testimony of farm-management surveys, 
covering a wide area, that this unit is too small 
to yield the owner the best results from his 



us THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

labor. In a Nebraska survey it is demon- 
strated that farms of from 200 to 250 acres 
show better average returns than those of larger 
or smaller groups, but rainfall, soil conditions, 
and the farmer's personal qualifications are 
factors in all such studies that make generaliza- 
tions diflScult. A diversified farm of 160 acres 
requires approximately 3,000 hours' labor a 
year. Forty-five acres of corn, shocked and 
husked, consume 270 days of labor; like acre- 
ages of oats and clover, 90 and 45 days respec- 
tively; care of live-stock and poultry, 195 days. 
In summer a farmer often works twelve or four- 
teen hours a day, while in winter, with only 
his stock to look after, his labor is reduced to 
three or four hours. 

The Smith-Hughes Act (approved February, 
1917) appropriates annually sums which will 
attain, in 1926, a maximum of $3,000,000 "for 
co-operation with the States in the promotion 
of education in agriculture and the trades and 
industries, and in the preparation of teachers 
of vocational subjects, the sums to be allotted 
to the States in the proportion which their rural 
population bears to the total rural population 
of the United States." Washington is only 
the dynamic centre of inspiration and energy 
in the application of the laws that make so 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 129 

generous provision for the farmer's welfare. 
The States must enter into a contract to de- 
fray their share of the expense and put the 
processes into operation. 

There was something of prophecy in the 
message of President Roosevelt (February 9, 
1909) transmitting to Congress the report of 
his Country Life Commission. He said: "Upon 
the development of country life rests ultimately 
our ability, by methods of farming requiring 
the highest intelligence, to continue to feed 
and clothe the hungry nations; to supply the 
city with fresh blood, clean bodies, and clear 
brains that can endure the terrific strain of 
modern life; we need the development of men 
in the open country, who will be in the future, 
as in the past, the stay and strength of the na- 
tion in time of war, and its guiding and con- 
trolling spirit in time of peace." The far-reach- 
ing effect of the report, a remarkably thorough 
and searching study of farm conditions, is per- 
ceptible in agencies and movements that were 
either suggested by it or that were strengthened 
by its authoritative utterances. 



130 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 



Much has been written of the dechne of 
reUgion in rural communities, and melancholy 
statistics have been adduced as to the abandon- 
ment of churches. But here, as in the matter 
of farm eflBciency and kindred rural problems, 
vigorous attempts are making to improve con- 
ditions. ''The great spiritual needs of the coun- 
try community just at present are higher per- 
sonal and community ideals," the Country Life 
Commission reported. ''Rural people have 
need to have an aspiration for the highest pos- 
sible development of the community. There 
must be an ambition on the part of the people 
themselves constantly to progress in all those 
things that make the community life whole- 
some, satisfying, educative, and complete. 
There must be a desire to develop a permanent 
environment for the country boy and girl, of 
which they will become passionately fond. As 
a pure matter of education, the countryman 
must learn to love the country and to have an 
intellectual appreciation of it." In this con- 
nection I wish that every farm boy and girl in 
America might read "The Holy Earth," by 
L. H. Bailey (a member of the commission), a 
book informed with a singular sweetness and 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 131 

nobility, and fit to be established as an auxiliary 
reading-book in every agricultural college in 
America. 

There is abundant evidence that the religious 
bodies are not indifferent to the importance of 
vitalizing the country church, and here the gen- 
eral socializing movement is acting as a stimulus. 
Not only have the churches, in federal and 
State conferences, set themselves determinedly 
to improve the rural parish, but the matter has 
been the subject of much discussion by educa- 
tional and sociological societies with encourag- 
ing gains. The wide-spread movement for the 
consolidation of country schools suggests in- 
evitably the combination of country parishes, 
assuring greater stability and making possible 
the employment of permanent ministers of a 
higher intellectual type, capable of exercising 
that intelligent local leadership which all com- 
mentators on the future of the farm agree is 
essential to progress. 

By whatever avenue the rural problem is ap- 
proached it is apparent that it is not sufficient 
to persuade American youth of the economic 
advantages of farming over urban employments, 
but that the new generation must be convinced 
in very concrete ways that country life affords 
generous opportunities for comfort and happi- 



132 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

ness, and that there are compensations for all 
it lacks. The farmer of yesterday, strongly in- 
dividualistic and feeling that the world's rough 
hand was lifted against him, has no longer an 
excuse for holding aloof from the countless 
forces that are attempting to aid him and give 
his children a better chance in life. No other 
figure in the American social picture is receiving 
so much attention as the farmer. A great 
treasure of money is expended annually by 
State and federal governments to increase his 
income, lessen his labor, educate his children, 
and bring health and comfort to his home. If 
he fails to take advantage of the vast machinery 
that is at work in his behalf, it is his own fault; 
if his children do not profit by the labors of 
the State to educate them, the sin is at his own 
door. In his business perplexities he has but 
to telephone to a county agent or to the ex- 
tension headquarters of his State to receive 
the friendly counsel of an expert. If his chil- 
dren are dissatisfied and long for variety and 
change, it is because he has concealed from 
them the means by which their lives may be 
quickened and brightened. 

With the gi-eatest self-denial I refrain from 
concluding this chapter with a ringing perora- 
tion in glorification of farm life. From a desk 




Judging graded shorthorn herds at the American Royal Live Stock Show 
in Kansas City. 



FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST 133 

on the fifteenth floor of an office-building, with 
an outlook across a smoky, clanging industrial 
city, I could do this comfortably and with an 
easy conscience. But the scientist has stolen 
farming away from the sentimentalist and the 
theorist. Farming, I may repeat, is a business, 
the oldest and the newest in the world. No 
year passes in which its methods and processes 
are not carried nearer to perfection. City boys 
now about to choose a vocation will do well to 
visit an agricultural college and extension plant, 
or, better still, a representative corn-belt farm, 
before making the momentous decision. Per- 
haps the thousands of urban lads who this year 
volunteered to aid the farmers as a patriotic 
service will be persuaded that the soil affords 
opportunities not lightly to be passed by. No 
one can foretell the vast changes that will be 
precipitated when the mighty war is ended; but 
one point is undebatable: the world, no matter 
how low its fortunes may sink, must have bread 
and meat. Tremendous changes and readjust- 
ments are already foreshadowed; but in all 
speculations the productiveness of the American 
farm will continue to be a factor of enormous 
importance. 

A wide-spread absorption of land by large 
investors, the increase of tenantry, and the 



134 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

passing of the farm family are possibilities of 
the future not to be overlooked by those who 
have at heart the fullest and soundest develop- 
ment of American democracy. For every 100 
acres of American land now under cultivation 
there are about 375 acres untilled but suscep- 
tible of cultivation. Here is a chance for Amer- 
ican boys of the best fibre to elect a calling that 
more and more demands trained intelligence. 
All things considered, the rewards of farming 
average higher than those in any other occupa- 
tion, and the ambitious youth, touched with the 
new American passion for service, for a more 
perfect realization of the promise of democracy, 
will find in rural communities a fallow field 
ready to his hand. 



CHAPTER IV 
CHICAGO 

'And yonder where, gigantic, wilful, young, 
Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates. 
With restless violent hands and casual tongue 

Moulding her mighty fates " 

William Vaughn Moody. 



A FATEFUL Titan, brooding over a mam- 
moth chess-board, now cautious in his 
' moves as he shifts his myriad pigmies, 
now daring, but always resolute, clear-eyed, 
steady of hand, and with no thought but vic- 
tory — as such a figure Rodin might have 
visuahzed twentieth-century Chicago. 

Chicago is not a baby and utters no bleating 
cry that it is ''misunderstood," and yet a great 
many people have not only misunderstood or 
misinterpreted it but have expressed their dis- 
like with hearty frankness. To many visitors 
Chicago is a city of dreadful night, to be ex- 
plored as hurriedly as possible with outward- 
bound ticket clenched tightly in hand. But 
Chicago may not be comprehended in the usual 
scamper of the tourist; for the interesting thing 
about this city is the people, and they require 

135 



136 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

time. I do not, of course, mean that they are 
all worthy of individual scrutiny, but rather 
that the very fact of so many human beings col- 
lecting there, living cheerfully and harmoni- 
ously, laboring and aspiring and illustrating the 
pressing, changing problems of our democracy 
awakens at once the beholder's sympathetic 
interest. Chicago is not New York, nor is it 
London or Paris: Chicago is different. The 
Chicagoan will convince you of this if you fail 
to see it; the point has been conceded by a 
great number of observers from all quarters, 
but not in just the same spirit in which the citi- 
zen speaks of it. 

Both inspired and uninspired critics have 
made Chicago the subject of a considerable 
literature that runs the gamut of anxious con- 
cern, dismal apprehension, dismay, and dis- 
gust. Mr. Kipling saw the city embodied as a 
girl arrayed in a costume of red and black, shod 
in red shoes sauntering jauntily down the gory 
aisle of a slaughter-house. Mr. H. G. Wells 
boasts that he refrained from visiting the pack- 
ing-houses owing to what he describes as his 
immense ''repugnance to the kilhng of fixed 
and helpless animals." He reports that he saw 
nothing of those "ill-managed, ill-inspected 
establishments," though he "smelt the un whole- 



CHICAGO 137 

some reek from them over and over again," 
and observed with trepidation "the enormous 
expanse and intricacy of railroads that net this 
great industrial desolation." Chicago's press- 
ing need, he philosophizes, is discipline — a 
panacea which he generously prescribes not 
only for all that displeased him in America, but 
for Lancashire, South and East London, and 
the Pas de Calais. ''Each man," he ruminates, 
''is for himself, each enterprise; there is no 
order, no prevision, no common and universal 
plan." I have cheerfully set down this last 
statement to lighten my own burdens, for by 
reversing it one may very happily express the 
real truth about Chicago. Instead of the 
*' shoving unintelligent proceedings of under- 
bred and morally obtuse men," great numbers 
of men and women of the highest intelligence 
are constantly directing their talents toward 
the amelioration of the very conditions that 
grieved Mr. Wells. 

Chicago may, to be sure, be dismissed in a 
few brilliant phrases as the black pit of perdi- 
tion, the jumping-off place of the world; but to 
the serious-minded American the effort making 
there for the common uplift is too searching, 
too intelligent, too sincere, for sneers. I fancy 
that in view of events that have occurred in 



138 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

Europe since his visit to America Mr. Wells 
would be less likely to rest his case against Chi- 
cago on the need of discipline alone. All that 
discipline may do for a people had been achieved 
by the Imperial German Government when 
the Kaiser started for Paris in 1914; but sub- 
jection, obedience, even a highly developed 
efficiency are not the whole of the law and the 
prophets. Justice and mercy are finer things, 
and nothing in Chicago is more impressive or 
encouraging than the stubborn purpose of many 
citizens who are neither foolish nor ignorant to 
win and establish these twain for the whole. 
It is an unjust and ungenerous assumption that 
Chicago is unaware of its needs and dangers, 
or that from year to year no gains are made 
in the attempt to fuse and enlighten the mass. 
It is the greatest laboratory that democracy 
has known. The very fact that so much effort 
must go into experiment, that there are more 
than two and a half million distinct units to 
deal with, with a resulting confusion in needs 
and aims, adds not merely to the perplexity 
but to the fascination of the social and political 
enigma. There is, quite definitely, a thing 
called the Chicago spirit, a thing compounded 
of energy, faith, and hope — and again energy ! 
Nor is the energy all spent upon the material 



CHICAGO 139 

and sordid, for the fine, arresting thing is the 
tremendous vim this lusty young giant among 
the world's cities brings to the solution of its 
problems — problems that deserve to be printed 
in capitals out of respect for their immensity 
and far-reaching importance to the national 
life. Chicago does not walk around her prob- 
lems, but meets them squarely and manfully. 
The heart of the inquirer is won by the perfect 
candor with which the Chicagoan replies to 
criticism; the critic is advised that for every 
evil there is a remedy; indeed, that some agency 
is at work on that particular thing at that par- 
ticular moment. This information is conveyed 
with a smile that expresses Chicago's faith and 
hope — a smile that may be a little sad and 
wistful — but the faith and the hope are in- 
escapably there. 

Chicago is the industrial and financial clear- 
ing-house, the inspirational centre of the arts, 
and the playground for 50,000,000 people. The 
pilgrim who lands on the lake shore with an 
open mind and a fair understanding of what 
America is all about — the unprejudiced trav- 
eller — is immediately conscious that here, in- 
deed, is a veritable capital of democracy. 

Every night three hundred or more sleeping- 



140 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

cars bear approximately 4,500 persons toward 
this Western metropolis on journeys varying 
from five to twelve hours in length. From in- 
numerable points it is a night's run, and any 
morning one may see these pilgrims pouring 
out of the railway-stations, dispersing upon a 
thousand errands, often concluded in time for 
the return trip between six o'clock and mid- 
night. At times one wonders whether all the 
citizens of the tributary provinces have not 
gathered here at once, so great is the pressure 
upon hotel space, so thronged the streets. The 
sleeping-car holds no terrors for the Westerner. 
He enjoys the friendship of the train-crews; 
the porters — many of them veterans of the 
service — call him by name and in addressing 
them he avoids the generic '* George," which 
the travelling salesman applies to all knights 
of the whisk-broom, and greets them by their 
true baptismal appellations of Joshua or Oba- 
diah. Mr. George Ade has threatened to or- 
ganize a "Society for the Prevention of the 
CaUing of Sleeping-Car Porters George"! 

The professional or business man rises from 
his meagre couch refreshed and keen for ad- 
venture and, after a strenuous day, returns to 
it and slumbers peacefully as he is hurled home- 
ward. The man from Sioux City or Saint Joe 



CHICAGO 141 

who spends a day here does not crawl into his 
berth weary and depressed, but returns inspired 
and cheered and determined to put more vim 
into his business the next morning. On the 
homeward trail, eating supper in company with 
the neighbors he finds aboard, he dilates elo- 
quently upon the wonders of the city, upon its 
enterprise, upon the heartiness with which its 
business men meet their customers. Chicago 
men work longer hours than their New York 
brethren and take pride in their accessibility. 
It is easier to get a hearing in high quarters in 
any field of endeavor in Chicago than in New 
York; there is less waiting in the anteroom, 
and a better chance of being asked out for 
lunch. 

The West is proud of Chicago and loves it 
with a passionate devotion. Nor is it the pur- 
pose of these reflections to hint that this mighty 
Mecca is unworthy of the adoration of the mil- 
lions who turn toward it in affection and rever- 
ence. Chicago not only draws strength from 
a vast territory but, through myriad agencies 
and avenues, sends back a mighty power from 
its huge dynamo. It is the big brother of all 
lesser towns, throwing an arm about Davenport 
and Indianapolis, Springfield and Columbus, 
and manifesting a kindly tolerance toward St. 



142 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

Louis, Kansas City, Detroit, Minneapolis, and 
Cleveland, whose growth and prosperity lift 
them to a recognized and respected rivalry. 

The intense loyalty of the Chicagoan to his 
city is one of his most admirable characteristics 
and the secret of his city's greatness. He is 
proud even of the Chicago climate, which ofifers 
from time to time every variety of weather 
known to meteorology and is capable of effect- 
ing combinations utterly new to this most fas- 
cinating of sciences. Chicago's coldest day of 
record was in 1872, when the minus registra- 
tion was 23; the hottest in 1901, when the mer- 
cury rose to 103. Such excesses are followed by 
contrition and repentance and days of ethereal 
mildness. The lake serves as a funnel down 
which roar icy blasts direct from the hyperbo- 
reans. The wind cuts like a scythe of ice swung 
by a giant. In summer the hot plains pour in 
their burning heat; or, again, when it pleases the 
weather-god to produce a humid condition, the 
moisture-charged air is stifling. But a Chicagoan 
does not mind the winter, which he declares to 
be good for body and soul; and, as for the heat, 
he maintains — and with a degree of truth to 
sustain him — that the nights are always cool. 
The throngs that gathered in Chicago for the 
Republican and the Progressive conventions in 



CHICAGO 143 

June, 1916, were treated to a diversity of 
weather, mostly bad. It was cold; it rained 
hideously. There were dismal hours of wait- 
ing for reports of the negotiations between the 
two bodies of delegates in which the noblest 
oratory failed to bring warmth and cheer. 
Chicago did her worst that week, but without 
serious impairment of her prestige as the greatest 
convention city in the world. Every one said, 
"Isn't this just like Chicago!" and inquired 
the way to the nearest quinine. 

"The Windy City" is a descriptive sobriquet. 
There are not only cold winds and hot winds 
of the greatest intensity, but there are innumer- 
able little gusts that spring up out of nowhere 
for no other conceivable purpose than to deposit 
dust or cinders in the human eye. There is a 
gesture acquired by all Chicagoans — a familiar 
bit of calisthenics essential to the preservation 
of head-gear. If you see a man pursuing his 
hat in a Chicago street you may be sure that 
he is an outsider; the native knows by a kind 
of prescience just when the fateful breeze is 
coming, prepares for it, and is never caught 
unawares. In like manner the local optic seems 
to be impregnable to persistent attacks of the 
omnipresent cinder. By what means the eye- 
ball of a visitor becomes the haven for flying 



144 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

debris, while the native-born walks unscathed, 
is beyond my philosophy. It must be that the 
eye of the inhabitant is trained to resist these 
malevolent assaults and that the sharp-edged 
cinder spitefully awaits an opportunity to im- 
pinge upon the defenseless optic of passing 
, pilgrims. The pall of smoke miraculously dis- 
appears at times and the cinder abandons its 
depredations. The sky may be as blue ovej: 
Chicago as anywhere else on earth. The lake 
shimmers like silk and from brown, near shore, 
runs away to the horizon through every tint 
of blue and green and vague, elusive purples. 



II 



Chicago still retained, in the years of my 
first acquaintance, something of the tang of 
the wild onion which in the Indian vernacular 
was responsible for its name. (I shudderingly 
take refuge in this parenthesis to avoid collision 
with etymological experts who have spent their 
lives sherlocking the word's origin. The genesis 
of ''Chicago" is a moot question, not likely to 
be settled at this late day. Whether it meant 
leek, pK)lecat, skunkweed, or onion does not 
greatly matter. I choose the wild onion from 
the possibilities, for the highly unscientific 



CHICAGO 145 

reason that it seems to me the most appropriate 
and flavorsome of all accessible suggestions.) 

In the early eighties one might stand by the 
lakeside and be very conscious of a West be- 
yond that was still in a pioneer stage. At the 
department headquarters of the army might 
be met hardy campaigners against the Indians 
of mountain and plain who were still a little 
apprehensive that the telegraph might demand 
orders for the movement of troops against hos- 
tile red men along the vanishing frontiers. The 
battle of Wounded Knee, in which 100 warriors 
and 120 women and children were found dead 
on the field (December 29, 1890), might almost 
have been observed from a parlor-car window. 
It may have been that on my visits I chanced 
to touch circles dominated by Civil War 
veterans, but great numbers of these diverted 
their energies to peaceful channels in Chicago 
at the end of the rebellion, and they gave color 
to the city life. It was a part of the upbringing 
of a mid-Western boy of my generation to rev- 
erence the heroes of the sixties, and it was fitting 
that in the land of Lincoln and in a State that 
gave Grant a regiment and started him toward 
immortaUty there should be frequent reunions 
of veterans, and political assemblages and agita- 
tions in which they figured, to encourage hero- 



146 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

worship in the young. Unforgetable among 
the more distinguished of these Civil War vet- 
erans was General John A. Logan, sometime 
senator in Congress and Blaine's running mate 
in 1884. In life he was a gallant and winning 
figure, and Saint Gaudens's equestrian statue 
in Grant Park preserves his memory in a city 
that delighted to honor him. 

Chicago's attractions in those days included 
summer engagements of Theodore Thomas's 
orchestra, preceding Mr. Thomas's removal to 
the city and the founding of the orchestra that 
became his memorial. Concerts were given in 
an exposition hall on the site now occupied 
by the Art Institute, with railway-trains gayly 
disporting on the lake side of the building. So 
persistent is the association of ideas, that to 
this day I never hear the Fifth Symphony or 
the Tannhauser Overture free of the rumble 
and jar and screech of traffic. It was in keeping 
with Chicago's good-humored tolerance of the 
incongruous and discordant in those years that 
the scores of Beethoven and Wagner should be 
punctuated by locomotive whistles, and that 
pianissimo passages should be drowned in the 
grinding of brakes. 

At this period David Swing stood every Sun- 
day morning in Central Music Hall addressing 



CHICAGO 147 

large audiences, and he looms importantly in 
the Chicago of my earliest knowledge. Swing 
was not only a fine classical scholar — he lec- 
tured charmingly on the Greek poets — but 
he preached a gospel that harmonized with the 
hopeful and liberal Chicago spirit as it gathered 
strength and sought the forms in which it has 
later declared itself. He was not an orator in 
the sense that Ingersoll and Beecher were; as 
I remember, he always read his sermons or 
addresses; but he was a strikingly individual 
and magnetic person, whose fine cultivation 
shone brilliantly in his discourses. In the ret- 
rospect it seems flattering to the Chicago of 
that time that it recognized and appreciated 
his quality in spite of an unorthodoxy that had 
caused his retirement from the formal ministry. 
The third member of a trinity that lingers 
agreeably in my memory is Eugene Field. 
Journalism has known no more versatile ge- 
nius, and his column of ''Sharps and Flats" in 
the Morning News (later the Record) voiced the 
Chicago of his day. Here indubitably was 
the flavor of the original wild-onion beds of the 
Jesuit chronicles ! Field became an institution 
quite as much as Thomas and Swing, and reached 
an audience that ultimately embraced the whole 
United States. The literary finish of his para- 



148 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

graphs, their wide range of subject, their tone, 
varying from kindly encouraging comment on 
a new book of verse that had won his approval 
to a mocking jibe at some politician, his hatred 
of pretense, the plausibility of the hoaxes he 
was constantly perpetrating, gave an infinite 
zest to his department. The most devoted of 
Chicagoans, he nevertheless laid a chastening 
hand upon his fellow citizens. In an ironic 
vein that was perhaps his best medium he would 
hint at the community's lack of culture, though 
he would be the first to defend the city from 
such assaults from without the walls. He pre- 
pared the way for the coming of Edmund Clar- 
ence Stedman with announcements of a series 
of bizarre entertainments in the poet's honor, 
including a street parade in which the meat- 
packing industry was to be elaborately repre- 
sented. He gave circulation to a story, purely 
fanciful, that Joel Chandler Harris was born in 
Africa, where his parents were missionaries, 
thus accounting for "Uncle Remus's" intimate 
acquaintance with negro characters and folk- 
lore. His devotion to journalism was such that 
he preferred to publish his verses in his news- 
paper rather than in magazines, often hoarding 
them for weeks that he might fill a column with 
poems and create the impression that they were 



CHICAGO 149 

all flung off as part of the day's work, though, 
as a matter of fact, they were the result of the 
most painstaking labor. With his legs thrown 
across a table he wrote, on a pad held in his 
lap, the minute, perpendicular hand, with its 
monkish rubrications, that gave distinction to 
all his ''copy." Among other accomplishments 
he was a capital recitationist and mimic. There 
was no end to the variety of ways in which he 
could interest and amuse a company. He was 
so pre-eminently a social being that it was dif- 
ficult to understand how he produced so much 
when he yielded so readily to any suggestion 
to strike work for any enterprise that promised 
diversion. I linger upon his name not because 
of his talents merely but because he was in a 
very true sense the protagonist of the city in 
those years; a veritable genius loci who expressed 
a Chicago, "wilful, young," that was disposed 
to stick its tongue in its cheek in the presence 
of the most exalted gods. 

My Chicago of the consulship of Plancus 
was illuminated also by the National League 
ball club, whose roster contained *' names to 
fill a Roman line" — "Pop" Anson, Clarkson, 
Williamson, Ryan, Pfeffer, and "Mike" KeUey. 
Chicago displayed hatchments of woe on her 
portals when Kelley was "sold to Boston" for 



150 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

$10,000 ! In his biography of Field Mr. Slason 
Thompson has preserved this characteristic 
paragraph — only one of many in which the 
wit, humorist, and poet paid tribute to Kelley's 
genius: 

"Benjamin Harrison is a good, honest, 
patriotic man, and we like him. But he never 
stole second base in all his life and he could 
not swat Mickey Welch's down curves over 
the left-field fence. Therefore, we say again, 
as we have said many times before, that, much 
as we revere Benjamin Harrison's purity and 
amiability, we cannot but accord the tribute 
of our sincerest admiration to that paragon 
of American manhood, Michael J. Kelley." 

Ill 

It must be said for Chicago that to the best 
of her ability her iniquities are kept in the open ; 
she conceals nothing; it is all there for your 
observation if you are disposed to pry into the 
heart of the matter. The rectihnear system 
of streets exposes the whole city to the sun's 
eye. One is struck by the great number of 
foreign faces, and by faces that show a blend- 
ing of races — a step, perhaps, toward the evo- 
lution of some new American type. On Michigan 



CHICAGO 151 

Avenue, where on fair afternoons something of 
the briUiant spectacle of Fifth Avenue is repro- 
duced, women in bright turbans, men in modifi- 
cations of their national garb — Syrians, Greeks, 
Turks, Russians and what-not — are caught up 
and hurried along in the crowd. In the shopping 
centres of Wabash Avenue and State Street the 
foreign element is present constantly, and even 
since the war's abatement of immigration these 
potential citizens are daily in evidence in the 
railway-stations. Yet one has nowhere the sense 
of congestion that is so depressing in New York's 
East Side; the overcrowding is not so apparent 
even where the conditions are the worst Chicago 
has to offer. 

My search for the picturesque had been dis- 
appointing until, quite undirected, I stumbled 
into Maxwell Street one winter morning and 
found its Jewish market to my liking. The 
"Ham Fair" in Paris is richer in antiquarian 
loot, but Maxwell Street is enough; 'twill serve ! 
Here we have squalor, perhaps, and yet a pretty 
clean and a wholly orderly squalor. Innumer- 
able booths litter the sidewalks of this thorough- 
fare between Halstead and Jefferson Streets, 
and merchandise and customers overflow into 
the streets until traffic is blocked. Fruits, vege- 
tables, meats, fowls, raiment of every kind are 



152 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

offered. Bushel-baskets are the ordained re- 
ceptacle for men's hats. A fine leisure char- 
acterizes the movements and informs the 
methods of the cautious purchaser. Cages of 
pigeons proudly surmounting coops of fowls 
suggested that their elevation might be attrib- 
utable to some special sanctity or reservation 
for sacrificial rites. A cynical policeman (I saw 
but one guardian of the peace in the course of 
three visits) rudely dispelled this illusion with 
a hint that these birds, enjoying a free range of 
the air, had doubtless been feloniously captured 
for exposure to sale in the market-place — an 
imputation upon the bearded keepers of the 
bird bazaars that I reject with scorn. Negroes 
occasionally cross the bounds of their own 
quarter to shop among these children of the 
Ghettos — I wonder whether by some instinc- 
tive confidence in the good-will of a people who 
like themselves do daily battle with the most 
deeply planted of all prejudices. 

Chicago is rich in types; human nature is 
comprehensively represented with its best and 
worst. It should be possible to find here, mid- 
way of the seas, the typical American, but I 
am mistrustful of my powers of selection in so 
grave a matter. There are too many men ob- 
s^vable in office-buildings and in clubs who 




-a 

S 

o 

a 



CHICAGO 153 

might pass as typical New Yorkers if they were 
encountered in Fifth Avenue, to make possible 
any safe choice for the artist's pencil. There is 
no denying that the average Chicagoan is less 
"smart" than the New Yorker. The pressing 
of clothes and nice differentiations in haber- 
dashery seem to be less important to the male 
here than to his New York cousin. I spent an 
anxious Sunday morning in quest of the silk 
hat, and reviewed the departing worshippers in 
the neighborhood of many temples in this search, 
but the only toppers I found were the crowning 
embellishments of two colored gentlemen in 
South State Street. 

Perhaps the typical Chicagoan is the com- 
muter who, after the day's hurry and fret, 
ponders the city's needs calmly by the lake 
shore or in prairie villages. Chicago's suburbs 
are felicitously named — Kenilworth, Winnetka, 
Hubbard Woods, Ravinia, Wilmette, Oak Park, 
and Lake Forest. But neither the opulence of 
Lake Forest and Winnetka, nor polo and a 
famous golf-course at Wheaton can obscure 
the merits of Evanston. The urban Chicagoan 
becomes violent at the mention of Evanston, 
yet here we jSnd a reservoir of the true West- 
ern folksiness, and Chicago profits by its pro- 
pinquity. Evanston goes to church, Evanston 



154 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

reads, Evanston is shamelessly high-brow with 
a firm substratum of evangelieanism. Here, 
on spring mornings, Chopin floats through 
many windows across the pleasantest of hedges 
and Dostoyefsky is enthroned by the evening 
lamp. The girl who is always at the tennis- 
nets or on the golf-links of Evanston is the same 
girl one has heard at the piano, or whose profile 
is limned against the lamp with the green shade 
as she ponders the Russians. She is symbolic 
and evocative of Chicago in altissimo. Her 
father climbs the heights perforce that he may 
not be deprived of her society. Fitted by nature 
to adorn the bright halls of romance, she is 
the sternest of realists. She discusses politics 
with sophistication, and you may be sure she 
belongs to many societies and can wield the 
gavel with grace and ease. She buries herself 
at times in a city settlement, for nothing is so 
important to this young woman as the uplift 
of the race; and in so far as the race's destiny 
is in her hands I cheerfully volunteer the opinion 
that its future is bright. 

I hope, however, to be acquitted of un- 
graciousness if I say that the most delightful 
person I ever met in Chicago, where an exact- 
ing social taste may find amplest satisfaction, 
and where, in the academic shades of three 



CHICAGO 155 

universities (Northwestern, Lake Forest, and 
Chicago), one may find the answer to a question 
in any of the arts or sciences — the most re- 
freshing and the most instructive of my en- 
counters was with a lady who followed the 
vocation of a pickpocket and shoplifter. A 
friend of mine who is engaged in the detection 
of crime in another part of the universe had 
undertaken to introduce me to the presence of 
a "gunman," a species of malefactor that had 
previously eluded me. Meeting this detective 
quite unexpectedly in Chicago, he made it pos- 
sible for me to observe numbers of gangsters, 
or persons he vouched for as such — gentlemen 
willing to commit murder for a fee so ridicu- 
lously low that it would be immoral for me to 
name it. 

It is enough that I beheld and even conversed 
with a worthy descendant of the murderers of 
Elizabethan tragedy — one who might confess, 
with the Second Murderer in Macbeth: 

"I am one, my liege, 
Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world 
Have so incens'd that I am reckless what 
I do to spite the world." 

But it was even more thrilling to be admitted, 
after a prearranged knock at the back door, 
into the home of a woman of years whose life 



156 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

has been one long battle with the social order. 
Assured by my friend that I was a trustworthy 
person, or, in the vernacular, *'all right," she 
entered with the utmost spirit into the dis- 
cussion of larceny as she had practised it. Only 
a week earlier she had been released from the 
Bridewell after serving a sentence for shop- 
lifting, and yet her incarceration — only one 
of a series of imprisonments — had neither 
embittered her nor dampened her zest for life. 
She met my inquiries as to the hazards of the 
game with the most engaging candor. I am 
ashamed to confess that as she described her 
adventures I could understand something of 
the lawless joy she found in the pitting of her 
wits against the law. She had lived in Chicago 
all her life and knew its every corner. The 
underworld was an open book to her; she pa- 
tiently translated for my benefit the thieves' 
argot she employed fluently. She instructed 
me with gusto and humor in the most approved 
methods of shoplifting, with warnings as to 
the machinery by which the big department 
stores protect themselves from her kind. She 
was equally wise as to the filching of purses, 
explaining that this is best done by three con- 
spirators if a crowded street-car be the chosen 
scene of operations. Her own function was 



CHICAGO 157 

usually the gentle seizure of the purse, to be 
passed quickly back to a confederate, and he 
in turn was charged with the responsibility of 
conveying it to a third person, who was expected 
to drop from the rear platform and escape. 
Having elucidated this delicate transaction, she 
laughed gleefully. "Once on a Wabash Avenue 
car I nipped a purse from a woman's lap and 
passed it back, thinking a girl who was working 
with me was right there, but say — I handed it 
to a captain of police!" Her husband, a bur- 
glar of inferior talents, sitting listlessly in the 
dingy room that shook under the passing ele- 
vated trains, took a sniff of cocaine. When I 
professed interest in the proceeding she said she 
preferred the hypodermic, and thereupon mixed 
a potion for herself and thrust the needle into 
an arm much swollen from frequent injections. 
Only the other day, a year after this visit, I 
learned that she was again in durance, this 
time for an ingenious attempt to defraud an 
insurance company. 

IV 

In the field of social effort Chicago has long 
stood at the fore, and the experiments have 
continued until a good many debatable points 



158 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

as to method have been determined. Hull 
House and Miss Jane Addams are a part of 
American history. There are those in Chicago 
who are sceptical as to the value of much of 
the machinery employed in social betterment, 
but they may be silenced effectively by a ques- 
tion as to just what the plight of the two and 
a half million would be if so many high-minded 
people had not consecrated themselves to the 
task of translating America into terms of ser- 
vice for the guidance and encouragement of the 
poor and ignorant. The spirit of this endeavor 
is that expressed in Arnold's lines on Goethe: 

"He took the suffering human race, 
He read each wound, each weakness clear; 
And struck his finger on the place 
And said : Thou ailest here and here ! " 

And when the diagnosis has been made some 
one in this city of hope is ready with a remedy. 
When I remarked to a Chicago alderman 
upon the great number of agencies at work in 
Chicago for social betterment, he said, with 
manifest pride: "This town is full of idealists !" 
What strikes the visitor is that so many of these 
idealists are practical-minded men and women 
who devote a prodigious amount of time, energy, 
and money to the promotion of social welfare. 
It is impossible to examine a cross-section any- 



CHICAGO 159 

where without finding vestigia of weKare effort, 
or traces of the movements for poKtical reform 
represented in the Municipal Voters' League, 
the Legislative League, or the City Club. 

It is admitted (grudgingly in some quarters) 
that the strengthening of the social fabric has 
carried with it an appreciable elevation of polit- 
ical ideals, though the proof of this is less im- 
pressive than we should like to have it. It is 
unfortunately true that an individual may 
be subjected to all possible saving influences — 
transformed into a clean, reputable being, yet 
continue to view his political obligations as 
through a glass darkly. Nor is the average 
citizen of old American stock, who is satisfied, 
very often, to accept any kind of local govern- 
ment so long as he is not personally annoyed 
about it, a wholly inspiring example to the 
foreign-born. The reformer finds it necessary 
to work coincidentally at both ends of the social 
scale. The preservation of race groups in Chi- 
cago's big wards (the vote in these political 
units ranges from eight to thirty-six thousand), 
is essential to safe manipulation. The bosses 
are not interested in the successful operation 
of the melting-pot. It is much easier for them 
to buy votes collectively from a padrone than 
to negotiate with individuals whose minds have 



160 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

been "corrupted" by the teachers of political 
honesty in settlements and neighborhood 
houses. However, the Chicago bosses enjoy 
little tranquillity; some agency is constantly 
on their heels with an impudent investigation 
that endangers their best-laid devices for "pro- 
tection." 

As an Americanizing influence, important as 
a means of breaking-up race aflBliations that 
facilitate the "delivery" of votes, Chicago has 
developed a type of recreation park that gives 
promise of the best results. The first of these 
were opened in the South Park district in 1905. 
There are now thirty-five such centres, which, 
without paralleling or infringing upon the work 
of other social agencies, greatly widen the scope 
of the city's social service. These parks com- 
prise a playground with baseball diamond, 
tennis-courts, an outdoor swimming-pool, play- 
grounds for young children, and a field-house 
containing a large assembly-hall, club-rooms, a 
branch library, and shower-baths with locker- 
rooms for men and women. Skating is offered 
as a winter diversion, and the halls may be used 
for dances, dramatic, musical, and other neigh- 
borhood entertainments. Clubs organized for 
the study of civic questions meet in these houses; 
there are special classes for the instruction of 



CHICAGO 161 

foreigners in the mystery of citizenship; and 
schemes of welfare work are discussed in the 
neighborhood councils that are encouraged to 
debate municipal problems and to initiate new 
methods of social service. A typical centre is 
Dvorak Park, ninety-five per cent of whose 
patrons are Bohemians. Among its organiza- 
tions are a Bohemian Old Settlers' Club and a 
Servant Girls' Chorus. Colonel H. C. Car- 
baugh, of the Civil Service Board of South 
Park Commissioners, in an instructive volume, 
"Human Welfare Work in Chicago," calls these 
park centres "'public community clearing- 
houses." They appeal the more strongly to 
the neighborhoods they serve from the fact 
that they are provided by the municipality, 
and, while under careful and sympathetic super- 
vision, are in a very true sense the property 
of the people. Visits are exchanged by the 
musical, gymnastic, or other societies of the 
several communities, with a view to promoting 
fellowship between widely separated neighbor- 
hoods. 

One has but to ask in Chicago whether some 
particular philanthropic or welfare work has 
been undertaken to be borne away at once to 
observe that very thing in successful operation. 
It is a fair statement that no one need walk 



162 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

the streets of the city hungry. Many doors 
stand ajar for the despairing. A common in- 
dictment of the churches, that they have neg- 
lected the practical application of Christianity 
to humanity's needs, hardly holds against Chi- 
cago's churches. The Protestant Episcopal 
Church has long been zealous in philanthropic 
and welfare work, and Methodists, Presbyteri- 
ans and Baptists are conspicuously active in 
these fields. The Catholic Church in Chicago 
extends a helping hand through forty-five alert 
and well-managed agencies. The total dis- 
bursement of the Associated Jewish Charities 
for the year ending May, 1916, was $593,466, 
and the Jewish people of Chicago contribute 
generously to social-welfare eflForts outside their 
fold. The Young Men's Christian Association 
conducts a great number of enterprises, includ- 
ing a nineteen-story hotel, built at a cost of 
$1,350,000, which afiFords temporary homes to 
the thousands of young men who every year 
seek employment in Chicago. This huge struc- 
ture contains 1,821 well- ventilated rooms that 
are rented at from thirty to fifty cents a day. 
The Chicago Association has twenty-nine widely 
distributed branches, offering recreation, voca- 
tional instruction, and spiritual guidance. The 
Salvation Army addresses itself tirelessly to 



CHICAGO 163 

Chicago's human problem. Colonel Oarbaugh 
thus summarizes the army's work for the year 
ending in September, 1916: "At the various 
institutions for poor men and women 151,501 
beds and meals were worked for; besides which 
$38,779.98 in cash was paid to the inmates for 
work done. To persons who were not in a po- 
sition to work, or whom it was impossible to 
supply with work, 111,354 beds and meals, 11,- 
330 garments and pairs of shoes, and 123 tons 
of coal were given without charge." 

The jaunty inquirer for historical evidences — 
hoary ruins "out of fashion, like a rusty mail 
in monumental mockery" — is silenced by the 
multiphcity of sentry-houses that mark the line 
of social regeneration and security. Chicago is 
carving her destiny and in no small degree 
moulding the future of America by these labo- 
rious processes brought to bear upon humanity 
itself. Perhaps the seeker in quest of the spirit 
of Chicago better serves himself by sitting for 
an hour in a community centre, in a field-house, 
in the juvenile court, in one of the hundreds of 
places where the human problem is met and 
dealt with hourly than in perusing tables of 
statistics. 

At every turn one is aware that no need, no 
abuse is neglected, and an immeasurable pa- 



164 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

tience characterizes all this labor. One looks at 
Chicago's worst slum with a sense that after all 
it is not so bad, or that at any rate it is not 
hopeless. Nothing is hopeless in a city where 
the highest reach down so constantly to the 
lowest, where the will to protect, to save, to 
lift is everywhere so manifest. This will, this 
determination is well calculated to communicate 
a certain awe to the investigator: no other ex- 
pression of the invincible Chicago spirit is so 
impressive as this. 



Anno Urbis Conditce may not be appended 
to any year in the chronicles of a city that has 
so repeatedly rebuilt itself and that goes cheer- 
fully on demolishing yesterday's structures to 
make way for the nobler achievements of to- 
morrow. While the immediate effect of the 
World's Columbian Exposition of 1892-3 was 
to quicken the civic impulse and arouse Chicago 
to a sense of her own powers, a lasting and con- 
crete result is found in the ambition inspired 
by the architectural glories of the fair to invoke 
the same arts for the city's permanent beauti- 
fication. The genius of Mr. Daniel H. Burn- 
ham, who waved the magic wand that summoned 



CHICAGO 165 

"pillared arch and sculptured dome" out of flat 
prairie and established "the White City" to 
live as a happy memory for many millions in 
all lands, was enlisted for the greater task. 
Without the fair as a background the fine talents 
of Mr. Burnham and his collaborator, Mr. Ed- 
ward H. Bennett, might never have been exer- 
cised upon the city. Chicago thinks in large 
terms, and being properly pleased with the 
demonstration of its abihty to carry through 
an undertaking of heroic magnitude it imme- 
diately sought other fields to conquer. The 
fair had hardly closed its doors before Mr. Burn- 
ham and Mr. Bennett were engaged by the 
Commercial Club to prepare comprehensive 
plans for the perpetuation of something of the 
charm and beauty of the fairy city as a per- 
manent and predominating feature of Chicago. 
Clearly what served so well as a temporary 
matter might fill the needs of all time. The 
architects boldly attacked the problem of estab- 
lishing as the outer line, the fagade of the city, 
something distinctive, a combination of land- 
scape and architecture such as no other Amer- 
ican city has ever created out of sheer pride, 
determination, and sound taste. Like the 
aesthetic problems, the practical difficulties im- 
posed by topography, commercial pre-emptions. 



166 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

and legal embarrassments were intrusted only 
to competent and sympathetic hands. The 
whole plan, elaborated in a handsome volume 
published in 1909, with the effects contemplated 
happily anticipated in the colored drawings of 
Mr. Jules Guerin, fixed definitely an ideal and 
a goal. 

This programme was much described and 
discussed at the time of its inception, and I 
had ignorantly assumed that it had been neg- 
lected in the pressure of matters better cal- 
culated to resound in bank clearings, but I had 
grossly misjudged the firmness of the Chicago 
fibre. The death of Mr. Burnham left the 
architectural responsibilities of the work in 
the very capable hands of Mr. Bennett. The 
Commercial Club, an organization of highest 
intelligence and influence, steadfastly supported 
the plan until it was reinforced by a strong 
public demand for its fulfilment. The move- 
ment has been greatly assisted by Mr. Charles 
H. Wacker, president of the plan commission 
and the author of a primer on the subject that 
is used in the public schools. Mr. Wacker' s 
vigorous propaganda, through the press and 
by means of illustrated lectures in school and 
neighborhood houses, has tended to the democ- 
ratizing of what might have passed as a fanci- 



CHICAGO 167 

ful scheme of no interest to the great body of 
the people. 

With singular perversity nature vouchsafed 
the fewest possible aids to the architect for the 
embellishment of a city that had grown to 
prodigious size before it became conscious of 
its artistic deficiencies. The lake washes a 
flat beach, unbroken by any islanded bay to 
rest the eye, and the back door is level with 
limitless prairie. There is no hill on which to 
plant an acropolis, and the Chicago River (trans- 
formed into a canal by clever engineering) of- 
fered little to the landscape-architect at any 
stage of its history. However, the distribution 
of parks is excellent, and they are among the 
handsomest in the world. These, looped to- 
gether by more than eighty miles of splendid 
boulevards, afford four thousand acres of open 
space. The early pre-emption of the lake front 
by railroad-tracks added to the embarrassments 
of the artist, but the plan devised by Messrs. 
Burnham and Bennett conceals them by a 
broadening of Grant Park that cannot fail to 
produce an effect of distinction and charm. 
Chicago has a playful habit of driving the lake 
back at will, and it is destined to farther re- 
cessions. When the prodigious labors involved 
in the plan are completed the lake may be con- 



168 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

templated across green esplanades, broken by 
lagoons; peristyles and statuary will be a feature 
of the transformed landscape. The new Field 
Museum is architecturally consonant with the 
general plan; a new art museum and other 
buildings are promised that will add to the 
variety and picturesqueness of the whole. With 
Michigan Avenue widened and brought into 
harmony with Grant Park, thus extended and 
beautified and carried across the river north- 
ward to a point defined at present by the old 
water-tower (one of Chicago's few antiquities), 
landscape-architecture will have set a new mark 
in America. The congestion of north and 
south bound traffic on Michigan Avenue will be 
relieved by a double-decked bridge, making pos- 
sible the classification of traffic and the exclusion 
of heavy vehicles from the main thoroughfare. 
All this is promised very soon, now that neces- 
sary legislation and legal decisions are clearing 
the way. The establishment of a civic centre, 
with a grouping of public buildings that would 
make possible further combinations in keeping 
with those that are to lure the eye at the lake- 
side is projected, but may be left for another 
generation to accomplish. 

Chicago's absorption in social service and 
well-planned devices for taking away the re- 



CHICAGO 169 

proach of its ugliness is not at the expense of 
the grave problems presented by its politics. 
Here again the inquirer is confronted by a 
formidable array of citizens, effectively or- 
ganized, who are bent upon making Chicago a 
safe place for democracy. That Chicago shall 
be the best-governed city in America is the 
aspiration of great numbers of men and women, 
and one is struck once more not merely by the 
energy expended in these matters but by the 
thoroughness and far-sightedness of the efforts 
for political betterment. Illinois wields so great 
an influence in national affairs that strictly 
municipal questions suffer in Chicago as in 
every other American city where the necessities 
of partisan politics constantly obscure local 
issues. The politics of Chicago is bewilderingly 
complicated by the complexity of its govern- 
mental machinery. 

It is staggering to find that the city has not 
one but, in effect, twenty-two distinct governing 
agencies, all intrusted with the taxing power ! 
These include the city of Chicago, a board of 
education, a library board, the Municipal Tuber- 
culosis Sanitarium, the county government of 
Cook County, the sanitary district of Chicago, 
and sixteen separate boards of park commis- 
sioners. The interests represented in these 



170 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

organizations are, of course, identical in so far 
as the taxpaying citizen is concerned. An 
exhaustive report of the Chicago Bureau of 
Pubhc Efficiency pubhshed in January, 1917, 
reaches the conclusion that "this community 
is poorly served by its hodgepodge of irrespon- 
sible governing agencies, not only independent 
of one another but often pulling and hauling 
at cross-purposes. A single governing agency, 
in which should be centred all the local adminis- 
trative and legislative functions of the com- 
munity, but directly responsible to the voters, 
would be able to render services which existing 
agencies could not perform nearly so well, if 
at all, even if directed by officials of exceptional 
ability. The present system, however, instead 
of attracting to public employment men of 
exceptional ability, tends to keep them out, 
with the result that the places are left at the 
disposal of partisan-spoils political leaders." 

The waste entailed by this multiplication of 
agencies and resulting diffusion of power and 
responsibility is illustrated by the number of 
occasions on which the citizen is called upon 
to register and vote. The election expenses of 
Chicago and Cook County for 1916 were more 
than two million dollars, an increase of one 
hundred per cent in four years. This does not, 
of course, take account of the great sums ex- 



CHICAGO 171 

pended by candidates and party organizations, 
or the waste caused by the frequent interrup- 
tions to normal business. Chicago's calendar 
of election events for 1918 includes opportuni- 
ties for registration in February, March, Au- 
gust, and October; city primaries in February; 
general primaries in September; a city election 
in April; and a general election in November. 

Under the plan of unified government pro- 
posed by the Bureau of EflSciency there would 
be but three regular elections in each four-year 
period, two biennial elections for national and 
State oJBficials, and one combined municipal 
and judicial election. A consolidation and 
reform of the judicial machinery of Cook County 
and Chicago is urged by the bureau, which 
complains that the five county courts and the 
municipal court of Chicago, whose functions 
are largely concurrent, cost annually two and 
a quarter million. There are six separate clerks' 
oflSces and a small army of deputy sheriffs and 
bailiffs to serve these courts, with an evident 
paralleling of labor. While the city and county 
expend nearly a million dollars annually for 
legal services, this is not the whole item, for 
the library board, the board of education, and 
committees of the city council may, on occasion, 
employ special counsel. 

The policing of so large a city, whose very 



172 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

geographical position makes it a convenient 
way station for criminals of every sort, where 
so many races are to be dealt with, and where 
the existing form of municipal government 
keeps politics constantly to the fore, is beset 
with well-nigh insuperable obstacles. Last year 
the police department passed through a fierce 
storm with what seems to be a resulting im- 
provement in conditions. An investigator of 
the Committee of Fifteen, a citizens' organiza- 
tion, declared in May, 1917, that ten per cent 
of the men on the police force are ''inherently 
crooked and ought to be driven from the de- 
partment." To which a police official retorted 
that for every crooked policeman there are 
500 crooked citizens, an ill-tempered aspersion 
too shocking for acceptance. The Chicago Daily 
News Almanac records 114,625 arrests in 1915. 
Half of the total are set down as Americans; 
there were 9,508 negroes, 4,739 Germans, 2,144 
Greeks, 7,644 Polanders, 5,577 Russians, 2,981 
Italians, and 2,565 Irish. In that year there 
were 194 murders — 35 fewer than in 1914. 
Comparisons in such matters are not profitable 
but it may be interesting to note that in 1915 
there were 222 murders in New York; 244 in 
1914; 265 in 1913. Over 3,000 keepers and in- 
mates of Chicago gaming-houses were arrested 



CHICAGO 173 

in 1915. The cost of the police department is 
in excess of $7,000,000 — an amount just about 
balanced by the Hcense fee paid by the city's 
seven thousand saloons. Until recently the 
State law closing saloons on Sunday was ig- 
nored, but last year the city police department 
undertook to enforce it, with (to the casual eye) 
a considerable degree of success. 

The report of the Bureau of Efficiency recom- 
mends the consolidation of the existing govern- 
ing agencies into a single government headed 
by an executive of the city-manager type. In- 
stead of a political mayor elected by popular 
vote the office would be filled by the city council 
for an indefinite tenure. The incumbent would 
be the executive officer of the council and he 
might be given a seat in that body without a 
vote. The council would be free to go outside 
the city if necessary in its search for a competent 
mayor under this council-manager plan. One 
has but to read the Chicago newspapers to be 
satisfied that some such change as here indicated 
is essential to the wise and economical govern- 
ment of the city. Battles between the mayor 
and the council, upheavals in one city depart- 
ment or another occur constantly with a serious 
loss of municipal dignity. With deep humility 
I confess my incompetence for the task of de- 



174 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

scribing the present mayor of Chicago, Mr. 
William Hale Thompson, whose antics since he 
assumed office have given Chicago a vast 
amount of painful publicity. As a public offi- 
cial his manifold infelicities (I hope the term is 
sufficiently delicate) have at least served to 
strengthen the arguments in favor of the recall 
as a means of getting rid of an unfit office- 
holder.* Last year a general shaking up of the 
police department had hardly faded from the 
head-lines before the city's school system, a fre- 
quent storm-centre, caught the limelight. The 
schools are managed by a board of trustees ap- 
pointed by the mayor. On a day last spring 
(1917) the board met and discharged the super- 
intendent of schools (though retaining him tem- 
porarily), and, if we may beheve the news col- 
umns of the Chicago Tribune, "Chicago's mayor 
was roped, thrown, and tied so rapidly that the 
crowd gasped, laughed, and broke into a cheer 
almost in one moment." I mention this episode, 
which was followed in a few weeks by the rein- 
statement of the superintendent with an increase 
of salary, as justifying the demand for a form 
of government that will perform its functions 
decently and in order and without constant dis- 
turbances of the public service that result only 
in the encouragement of incompetence. 

* Mr. Thompson was re-elected April 1, 1919, by a plurality of 17,600. 



CHICAGO 175 

The politicians will not relinquish so big a 
prize without a struggle; but one turns from 
the dark side of the picture to admire the many 
hopeful, persistent agencies that are addressing 
themselves to the correction of these evils. The 
best talents of the city are devoted to just these 
things. The trustees of the Bureau of Public 
Efficiency are Julius Rosenwald, Alfred L. 
Baker, Onward Bates, George G. Tunnell, 
Walter L. Fisher, Victor Elting, Allen B. Pond, 
and Frank I. Moulton, whose names are worthy 
of all honor as typical of Chicago's most suc- 
cessful and public-spirited citizens. The City 
Club, with a membership of 2,400, is a wide- 
awake organization whose 27 civic committees, 
enlisting the services of 500 members, are con- 
stantly studying municipal questions, institut- 
ing inquiries, and initiating "movements" well 
calculated to annoy and alarm the powers that 
prey. 

Space that I had reserved for some note of 
Chicago's industries, the vastness of the stock- 
yards, the great totals in beasts and dollars 
represented in the meat-packing business, the 
lake and railroad tonnage, and like matters, 
shrinks under pressure of what seem, on the 
whole, to be things of greater interest and 
significance. That the total receipts of live- 



176 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

stock for one year exceeded 14,000,000 with a 
cash value of $370,938,156 strikes me as less 
impressive than the fact that a few miles distant 
from the packing-houses exists an art institute, 
visited by approximately a million persons an- 
nually, and an art school that affords capable 
instruction to 3,000 students. Every encourage- 
ment is extended to these pupils, nor is the art- 
ist, once launched upon his career, neglected by 
the community. The city provides, through a 
Commission for the Encouragement of Local 
Art, for the purchase of paintings by Chicago 
artists. There are a variety of private organi- 
zations that extend a helping hand to the tyro, 
and lectures and concerts are abundantly pro- 
vided. A few years ago the National Institute 
of Arts and Letters met for the first time in 
Chicago. It must have been with a certain 
humor that the citizens spread for the members, 
who came largely from the East, a royal ban- 
quet in the Sculpture Hall of the Institute, as 
though to present Donatello and Verrocchio as 
the real hosts of the occasion. It is by such 
manifestations that Chicago is prone to stifle 
the charge of philistinism. 

With a noteworthy absence of self-conscious- 
ness, Chicago assimilates a great deal of music. 
The symphony orchestra, founded by Theodore 




Banquet given for the members of the National Institute of Arts and 

Letters. 



CHICAGO 177 

Thomas and conducted since his death by 
Frederic Stock, offers a series of twenty-eight 
concerts a year. Eight thousand contributors 
made possible the building of Orchestra Hall, 
the organization's permanent home. Boston is 
not more addicted to symphonies than Chicago. 
Indeed, on afternoons when concerts are 
scheduled the agitations of the musically minded 
in popular refectories, the presence in Michigan 
Avenue of suburban young women, whom one 
identifies at sight as devotees of Bach and 
Brahms, suggest similar scenes that are a part 
of the life of Boston. The luxury of grand opera 
is offered for ten weeks every winter by artists 
of first distinction; and it was Chicago, we shall 
frequently be reminded, that called New York's 
attention to the merits of Mme. Galli-Curci. 
Literature too is much to the fore in Chicago, 
but I shall escape from the task of enumerating 
its many practitioners by pleading that only a 
volume would do justice to the subject. The 
contributors to Mr. Bert Leston Taylor's ''Line 
o' Type" column in the Tribune testify daily to 
the prevalence of the poetic impulse within the 
city and of an alert, mustang, critical spirit. 

With all its claims to cosmopolitanism one is 
nevertheless conscious that Chicago is only a 
prairie county-seat that is continually outgrow- 



178 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

ing its bounds, but is striving to maintain its 
early fundamental devotion to decency and 
order, and develop among its millions the re- 
spect for those things that are more excellent 
that is so distinguishing a trait of the Folks 
throughout the West. Chicago's strength is 
the strength of the soil that was won for civili- 
zation and democracy by a great and valorous 
body of pioneer freemen; and the Chicago spirit 
is that of the men and women who plunged into 
the West bearing in their hearts that "some- 
thing pretty fine" (in Lincoln's phrase), which 
was the ideal of the founders of the republic. 
"The children of the light" are numerous 
enough to make the materialists and the philis- 
tines uncomfortable if not heartily ashamed of 
themselves; for it is rather necessary in Chicago 
to have "interests," to manifest some degree of 
curiosity touching the best that has been thought 
and done in the world, and to hold a commis- 
sion to help and to serve the community and 
the nation, to win the highest esteem. 

Every weakness and every element of strength 
in democracy, as we are experimenting with it, 
has definite and concrete presentment in Chi- 
cago. In the trying months preceding and 
following the declaration of war with Germany 
the city repeatedly asserted its intense patriot- 



CHICAGO 179 

ism. The predominating foreign-born popula- 
tion is German, yet once the die was cast these 
citizens were found, except in negligible in- 
stances, supporting the American cause as loy- 
ally as their neighbors of old American stock. 
The city's patriotic ardor was expressed repeat- 
edly in popular demonstrations — beginning 
with a preparedness parade in June, 1916, in 
which 150,000 persons participated; in public 
gatherings designed to unify sentiment, not least 
noteworthy of these being the meeting in the 
stock-yards pavilion in May, of last year, when 
12,000 people greeted Colonel Roosevelt. The 
visit of M. Viviani and Field-Marshal Joffre 
afforded the city another opportunity to mani- 
fest its devotion to the cause of democracy. 
Every responsibility entailed by America's en- 
trance into the war was met immediately with 
an enthusiasm so hearty that the Chicago press 
was to be pardoned for indulging in ironic flings 
at the East, which had been gloomily appre- 
hensive as to the attitude of the Middle West. 
The flag flies no more bhthely or securely 
anywhere in America than in the great city 
that lies at the northern edge of the prairies 
that gave Lincoln to be the savior of the nation. 
Those continuing experiments and that struggle 
for perfection that are the task of democracy 



180 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

have here their fullest manifestation, and the 
knowledge that these processes and undertakings 
are nobly guided must be a stimulus and an in- 
spiration to all who have at heart the best that 
may be sought and won for America. 



CHAPTER V 
THE MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 

The great interior region hounded east by the AlleghanieSy north 
by the British dominions, west by the Rocky Mountains, and 
south by the line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets 
. . , already has above 10,000,000 people, and will have 50,000,000 
within fifty years if not prevented by any political folly or mistake. 
It contains more than one-third of the country owned by the United 
States — certainly more than 1,000,000 square miles. Once half 
as populous as Massachusetts already is, it would have more than 
75,000,000 people. A glance at the map shows that, territorially 
speaking, it is the great body of the republic. The other parts are 
but marginal borders to it. — Lincoln : Annual Message to Con- 
gress, December, 1862. 



IF a general participation in politics is essen- 
tial to the successful maintenance of a 
democracy, then the people of the West 
certainly bear their share of the national bur- 
den. A great deal of history has been made 
in what Lincoln called "the great body of the 
republic," and the election of 1916 indicated 
very clearly the growing power of the West in 
national contests, and a manifestation of inde- 
pendence that is not negligible in any conjec- 
tures as to the issues and leadership of the 
immediate future. 

181 



182 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

A few weeks before the last general election I 
crossed a Middle Western State in company 
with one of its senators, a veteran politician, 
who had served his party as State chairman and 
as chairman of the national committee. In the 
smoking compartment was a former governor of 
an Eastern State and several others, represent- 
ing both the major parties, who were bound for 
various points along the line where they were to 
speak that night. In our corner the talk was 
largely reminiscent of other times and bygone 
statesmen. Republicans and Democrats ex- 
changed anecdotes with that zest which distin- 
guishes the Middle Western politician, men of 
one party paying tribute to the character and 
ability of leaders of the other in a fine spirit of 
magnanimity. As the train stopped, from time 
to time, the United States senator went out upon 
the platform and shook hands with friends and 
acquaintances, or received reports from local 
leaders. Everybody on the train knew him; 
many of the men called him by his first name. 
He talked to the women about their children 
and asked about their husbands. The whole 
train caught the spirit of his cheer and friendli- 
ness, and yet he had been for a dozen years the 
most abused man in his State. This was all in 
the day's work, a part of what has been called 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 183 

the great American game. The West makes 
something intimate and domestic of its politics, 
and the idea that statesmen must "keep close 
to the people" is not all humbug, not at least 
in the sense that they hold their power very 
largely through their social qualities. They 
must, as we say, be ''folks." 

Apart from wars, the quadrennial presiden- 
tial campaigns are America's one great national 
expression in terms of drama; but through 
months in which the average citizen goes about 
his business, grateful for a year free of political 
turmoil, the political machinery is never idle. 
No matter how badly defeated a party may be, 
its State organization must not be permitted to 
fall to pieces; for the perfecting of an organiza- 
tion demands hard work and much money. 
There is always a great deal of inner plotting 
preliminary to a State or national contest, and 
much of this is wholly without the knowledge of 
the quiet citizen whose active interests are 
never aroused until a campaign is well launched. 
In State capitals and other centres men meet, 
as though by chance, and in hotel-rooms debate 
matters of which the public hears only when 
differences have been reconciled and a harmo- 
nious plan of action has been adopted. Not a 
day passes even in an "off year" when in the 



184 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

corn belt men are not travelling somewhere on 
political errands. There are fences to repair, 
local conditions to analyze, and organizations 
to perfect against the coming of the next cam- 
paign. In a Western State I met within the 
year two men who had just visited their gov- 
ernor for the purpose of throwing some "pep" 
into him. They had helped to elect him and 
felt free to beard him in the capitol to caution 
him as to his conduct. It is impossible to step 
off a train anywhere between Pittsburgh and 
Denver without becoming acutely conscious 
that much politics is forward. One campaign 
''doth tread upon another's heel, so fast they 
follow." This does not mean merely that the 
leaders in party organizations meet constantly 
for conferences, or that candidates are plotting a 
long way ahead to secure nominations, but that 
the great body of the people — the Folks them- 
selves — are ceaselessly discussing new move- 
ments or taking the measure of public servants. 
The politician lives by admiration; he likes 
to be pointed out, to have men press about him 
to shake his hand. He will enter a State con- 
vention at just the right moment to be greeted 
with a cheer, of which a nonchalant or depreca- 
tory wave of the hand is a sufficient recognition. 
Many small favors of which the public never 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 185 

dreams are granted to the influential politician, 
even when he is not an office-holder — favors that 
mean much to him, that contribute to his self- 
esteem. A friend who was secretary for several 
years of one of the national committees had a 
summer home by a quiet lake near an east-and- 
west railway-line. When, during a campaign, 
he was suddenly called to New York or Chicago 
he would wire the railway authorities to order 
one of the fast trains to pick him up at a lonely 
station, which it passed ordinarily at the high- 
est speed. My friend derived the greatest satis- 
faction from this concession to his prominence 
and influence. Men who affect to despise poli- 
ticians of the party to which they are opposed 
are nevertheless flattered by any attention from 
them, and they will admit, when there is no 
campaign forward, that in spite of their politics 
they are mighty good fellows. And they are 
good fellows; they have to be to retain their 
hold upon their constituents. There are excep- 
tions to the rule that to succeed in politics one 
must be a good fellow, a folksy person, but they 
are few. Cold, crafty men who are not "good 
mixers" may sometimes gain a great deal of 
power, but in the Western provinces they make 
poor candidates. The Folks don't like 'em ! 
Outside of New York and Pennsylvania, 



186 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

where much the same phenomena are observa- 
ble, there is no region where the cards are so 
tirelessly shuffled as in the Middle Western com- 
monwealths, particularly in Ohio, Indiana, Illi- 
nois, and Kansas, which no party can pretend to 
carry jauntily in its pocket. Men enjoy the 
game because of its excitement, its potentiali- 
ties of preferment, the chance that a few votes 
delivered in the right quarter may upset all 
calculations and send a lucky candidate for gov- 
ernor on his way to the Federal Senate or even 
to the White House. And in country towns 
where there isn't much to do outside of routine 
business the practice of politics is a welcome 
*' side-line." There is a vast amount of fun to 
be got out of it; and one who is apt at the game 
may win a county office or "go" to the legisla- 
ture. 

To be summoned from a dull job in a small 
town to a conference called suddenly and mys- 
teriously at the capital, to be invited to sit 
at the council-table with the leaders, greatly 
arouses the pride and vanity of men to whom, 
save for politics, nothing of importance ever 
happens. There are, I fancy, few American 
citizens who don't hug the delusion that they 
have political "influence." This vanity is re- 
sponsible for much party regularity. To have 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 187 

influence a man must keep his record clear of 
any taint of independence, or else he must be 
influential enough as an independent to win the 
respect of both sides, and this latter class is ex- 
ceedingly small. At some time in his life every 
citizen seeks an appointment for a friend, or 
finds himself interested in local or State or na- 
tional legislation. It is in the mind of the con- 
tributor to a campaign fund that the party of 
his allegiance has thus a concrete expression of 
his fidelity, and if he "wants something" he 
has opened a channel through which to make a 
request with a reasonable degree of confidence 
that it will not be ignored. There was a time 
when it was safe to give to both sides impar- 
tially so that no matter who won the battle 
the contributor would have established an obli- 
gation; but this practice has not worked so 
satisfactorily since the institution of publicity 
for campaign assessments. 

It is only immediately after an election that 
one hears criticisms of party management from 
within a party. A campaign is a great time- 
eater, and when a man has given six months 
or possibly a year of hard work to making an 
aggressive fighting machine of his party he is 
naturally grieved when it goes down in defeat. 
In the first few weeks following the election of 



188 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

1916 Western Republicans complained bitterly 
of the conduct of the national campaign. Un- 
happily, no amount of a posteriori reasoning 
can ever determine whether, if certain things 
had been handled differently, a result would 
have been changed. If Mr. Hughes had not 
visited California, or, venturing into that com- 
monwealth, he had shaken the hand of Governor 
Hiram Johnson, or if he had remained quietly 
on his veranda at home and made no speeches, 
would he have been elected President ? Specu- 
lations of this kind may alleviate the poignancy 
of defeat, but as a political situation is rarely 
or never repeated they are hardly profitable. 

There are phases of political psychology that 
defy analysis. For example, in doubtful States 
there are shifting moods of hope and despair 
which are wholly unrelated to tangible events 
and not reconcilable with "polls" and other pre- 
election tests. Obscure influences and counter- 
currents may be responsible, but often the poli- 
ticians do not attempt to account for these alter- 
nations of "feeling." When, without warning, 
the barometer at headquarters begins to fall, 
even the messengers and stenographers are 
affected. The gloom may last for a day or two 
or even for a week; then the chairman issues a 
statement "claiming" everything, every one 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 189 

takes heart of hope, and the dread spectre of 
defeat steals away to the committee-rooms of 
the opposition. 

An interesting species are the oracles whose 
views are sought by partisans anxious for trust- 
worthy "tips." These *' medicine-men" may 
not be actively engaged in politics, or only 
hangers-on at headquarters, but they are sup- 
posed to be endowed with the gift of prophecy. 
I know several such seers whose views on no 
other subject are entitled to the slightest con- 
sideration, and yet I confess to a certain respect 
for their judgment as to the outcome of an elec- 
tion. Late in the fall of 1916, at a time when the 
result was most uncertain, a friend told me that 
he was wagering a large sum on Mr. Wilson's 
success. Asked to explain his confidence, he 
said he was acting on the advice of an obscure 
citizen, whom he named, who always '* guessed 
right." This prophet's reasoning was wholly 
by inspiration; he had a *'hunch." State and 
county committee-rooms are infested with 
elderly men who commune among themselves 
as to old, unhappy, far-off things and battles 
long ago, and wait for a chance to whisper some 
rumor into the ear of a person of importance. 
Their presence and their misinformation add 
little to the joy of the engrossed, harassed strate- 



190 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

gists, who spend much time dodging them, but 
appoint a subordinate of proved patience to 
listen to their stories. 

To be successful a State chairman must 
possess a genius for organization and adminis- 
tration, and a capacity for quick decision and 
action. While he must make no mistakes him- 
self, it is his business to correct the blunders of 
his lieutenants and turn to good account the 
errors of his adversary. He must know how 
and where to get money, and how to use it to 
the best advantage. There are always local 
conditions in his territory that require judi- 
cious handling, and he must deal with these 
personally or send just the right man to smooth 
them out. Harmony is the great watchword, 
and such schisms as that of the Sound Money 
Democrats in 1896, the Progressive split of 
1912, and the frequent anti-organization fights 
that are a part of the great game leave much 
harsh jangling behind. 

The West first kicked up its heels in a na- 
tional campaign in the contest of 1840, when 
William Henry Harrison, a native of Virginia 
who had won renown as a soldier in the Ohio 
Valley and served as governor of the Northwest 
Territory, was the Whig candidate. The cam- 
paign was flavored with hard cider and keyed 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 191 

to the melody of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." 
The log cabin, with a raccoon on the roof or 
with a pelt of the species nailed to the outer 
wall, and a cider-barrel seductively displayed 
in the foreground, were popular party symbols. 
The rollicking campaign songs of 1840 reflect 
not only the cheery pioneer spirit but the bitter- 
ness of the contest between Van Buren and 
Harrison. One of the most popular ballads was 
a buckeye-cabin song sung to the tune of "The 
Blue Bells of Scotland": 

"Oh, how, tell me how does your buckeye cabin go? 
Oh, how, tell me how does your buckeye cabin go ? 
It goes against the spoilsman, for well its builders know 
It was Harrison who fought for the cabins long ago. 

Oh, who fell before him in battle, tell me who ? 
Oh, who fell before him in battle, tell me who ? 
He drove the savage legions and British armies, too. 
At the Rapids and the Thames and old Tippecanoe. 

Oh, what, tell me what will little Martin do ? 

Oh, what, then, what will little Martin do ? 

He'll follow the footsteps of Price and Swartout, too, 

While the log cabins ring again with Tippecanoe ! ** 

The spirit of the '40's pervaded Western 
politics for many years after that strenuous 
campaign. Men who had voted for "Tippe- 
canoe" Harrison were pointed out as citizens 
of unusual worth and dignity in my youth ; and 



192 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

organizations of these veterans were still in exist- 
ence and attentive to polities when Harrison's 
grandson was a candidate for the Presidency. 

I find myself referring frequently to the con- 
tinuing influence of the Civil War in the social 
and political life of these Western States. The 
''soldier vote" was long to be reckoned with, 
and it was not until Mr. Cleveland brought a 
new spirit into our politics that the war between 
the States began to fade as a political factor; and 
even then we were assured that if the Democrats 
succeeded they would pension Confederate sol- 
diers and redeem the Confederate bonds. There 
were a good many of us in these border States 
who, having been born of soldier fathers, and 
with Whig and Republican antecedents, began 
to resent the continued emphasis of the war in 
every campaign; and I look back upon Mr. 
Cleveland's rise as of very great importance in 
that he was a messenger of new and attractive 
ideals of public service that appealed strongly 
to young men. But my political apostasy (I 
speak of my own case because it is in some 
sense typical) was attended with no diminution 
of reverence for that great citizen army that 
defended and saved the Union. The annual 
gatherings of the Grand Army of the Republic 
have grown pathetically smaller, but this or- 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 193 

ganization is not a negligible expression of 
American democracy. The writing of these 
pages has been interrupted constantly by bugle- 
calls floating in from the street, by the cheers 
of crowds wishing Godspeed to our young army 
in its high adventure beyond the Atlantic, and 
at the moment, by stirring news of American 
valor and success in France. In my boyhood 
I viewed with awe and admiration the veterans 
of '61-' 65 and my patriotism was deeply in- 
fluenced by the atmosphere in which I was 
born, by acquaintance with my father's com- 
rades, and quickened through my formative 
years by attendance at encampments of the 
Grand Army of the Republic and cheery 
''camp-fires" in the hall of George H. Thomas 
Post, Indianapolis, where privates and generals 
met for story-telling and the singing of war- 
songs. The honor which it was part of my 
education should be accorded those men will, I 
reflect, soon be the portion of their grand- 
sons, the men of 1917-18, and we shall have 
very likely a new Grand Army of the Republic, 
with the difference that the descendants of men 
who fought under Grant and Sherman will meet 
at peaceful *' camp-fires" with grandsons of the 
soldiers of Lee and Jackson, quite unconscious 
that this was ever other than a united nation. 



194 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

II 

The West has never lost its early admiration 
for oratory, whether from the hustings, the pul- 
pit, or the lecture-platform. Many of the 
pioneer preachers of the Ohio valley were ora- 
tors of distinguished ability, and their frequent 
joint debates on such subjects as predestination 
and baptism drew great audiences from the 
countryside. Both religious and political meet- 
ings were held preferably out of doors to ac- 
commodate the crowds that collected from the 
far-scattered farms. A strong voice, a con- 
fident manner, and matter so composed as to 
hold the attention of an audience which would 
not hesitate to disperse if it lost interest were 
prerequisites of the successful speaker. West- 
ern chronicles lay great stress upon the ora- 
torical powers of both ministers and politicians. 
Henry Ward Beecher, who held a pastorate at 
Indianapolis (1839-47), was already famed as 
an eloquent preacher before he moved to 
Brooklyn. Not long ago I heard a number of 
distinguished politicians discussing American 
oratory. Some one mentioned the addresses 
delivered by Beecher in England during the 
Civil War, and there was general agreement 
that one of these, the Liverpool speech, was 







There is a death-watch that occupies front seats at every political 
meeting. 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 195 

probably the greatest of American orations — a 
sweeping statement, but its irresistible logic 
and a sense of the hostile atmosphere in which 
it was spoken may still be felt in the printed 
page. 

The tradition of Lincoln's power as an ora- 
tor is well fortified by the great company of 
contemporaries who wrote of him, as well as by 
the text of his speeches, which still vibrate with 
the nobility, the restrained strength, with which 
he addressed himself to mighty events. Neither 
before nor since his day has the West spoken 
to the East with anything approaching the 
majesty of his Cooper Union speech. It is 
certainly a far cry from that lofty utterance to 
Mr. Bryan's defiant cross-of-gold challenge of 
1896. 

The Westerner will listen attentively to a 
man he despises and has no intention of voting 
for, if he speaks well; but the standards are 
high. There is a death-watch that occupies 
front seats at every political meeting, composed 
of veterans who compare all later performances 
with some speech they heard Garfield or "Dan" 
Voorhees, Oliver P. Morton or John J. Ingalls 
deliver before the orator spouting on the plat- 
form was born. Nearly all the national con- 
ventions held in the West have been marked 



196 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

by memorable oratory. Colonel Robert G. 
IngersoU's speech nominating Blaine at the Re- 
publican convention of 1876 held at Cincinnati 
(how faint that old battle-cry has become: 
*'Blaine, Blaine, Blaine of Maine!") is often 
cited as one of the great American orations. 
"He swayed and moved and impelled and re- 
strained and worked in all ways with the mass 
before him," says the Chicago Times report, 
"as if he possessed some key to the innermost 
mechanism that moves the human heart, and 
when he finished, his fine, frank face as calm as 
when he began, the overwrought thousands 
sank back in an exhaustion of unspeakable 
wonder and delight." 

Even making allowance for the reporter's 
exuberance, this must have been a moving ut- 
terance, with its dramatic close: 

"Like an armed warrior, like a plumed 
knight, James G. Blaine marched down the 
halls of the American Congress and threw his 
shining lance full and fair against the brazen 
foreheads of the defamers of his country and 
the maligners of his honor. For the Republican 
party to desert this gallant leader now is as 
though an army should desert their gallant 
general upon the field of battle. . . . Gentle- 
men of the convention, in the name of the great 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 197 

republic, the only republic that ever existed 
upon this earth; in the name of all her defenders 
and of all her supporters; in the name of all her 
soldiers dead upon the field of battle, and in the 
name of those who perished in the skeleton 
clutch of famine at Andersonville and Libby, 
whose sufferings he so vividly remembers, Illi- 
nois, Illinois nominates for the next President 
of this country that prince of parliamentarians, 
that leader of leaders — James G. Blaine." 

In the fall of the same year IngersoU delivered 
at Indianapolis an address to war veterans that 
is still cited for its peroration beginning: "The 
past rises before me like a dream." 

The political barbecue, common in pioneer 
days, is about extinct, though a few such gather- 
ings were reported in the older States of the 
Middle West in the last campaign. These func- 
tions, in the day of poor roads and few settle- 
ments, were a means of luring voters to a meet- 
ing with the promise of free food; it was only 
by such heroic feats of cookery as the broiling 
of a whole beef in a pit of coals that a crowd 
could be fed. The meat was likely to be either 
badly burnt, or raw, but the crowds were not 
fastidious, and swigs of whiskey made it more 
palatable. Those were days of plain speech 
and hard hitting, and on such occasions orators 



198 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

were expected to *'cut loose" and flay the enemy 
unsparingly. 

Speakers of the rabble-rouser type have 
passed out, though there are still orators who 
proceed to "shell the woods" and "'burn the 
grass" in the old style in country districts 
where they are not in danger of being reported. 
This, however, is full of peril, as the farmer's 
creduHty is not so easily played upon as in the 
old days before the R. F. D. box was planted at 
his gate. The farmer is the shrewdest, the most 
difficult, of auditors. He is little given to ap- 
plause, but listens meditatively, and is not 
easily to be betrayed into demonstrations of 
approval. The orator's chance of scoring a 
hit before an audience of country folk depends 
on his ability to state his case with an appear- 
ance of fairness and to sustain it with argu- 
ments presented in simple, picturesque phrase- 
ology. Nothing could be less calculated to 
win the farmer's franchise than any attempt to 
*'play down" to him. In old times the city 
candidate sometimes donned his fishing-clothes 
before venturing into country districts, but some 
of the most engaging demagogues the West has 
known appeared always in their finest raiment. 

There has always been a considerable sprin- 
kling of women at big Indiana rallies and also at 







The Political Barbecue. 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 199 

State conventions, as far back as my memory 
runs; but women, I am advised, were rarely in 
evidence at political meetings in the West 
until Civil War times. The number who at- 
tended meetings in 1916 was notably large, 
even in States that have not yet granted general 
suffrage. They are most satisfactory auditors,. 
quick to catch points and eagerly responsive 
with applause. The West has many women 
who speak exceedingly well, and the number is 
steadily growing. I have never heard heckling 
so cleverly parried as by a young woman who 
spoke on a Chicago street corner, during the 
sessions of the last Republican convention, to 
a crowd of men bent upon annoying her. She 
was unfailingly good-humored, and her retorts, 
delivered with the utmost good nature, gradu- 
ally won the sympathy of her hearers. 

The making of political speeches is exhaust- 
ing labor, and only the possessor of great bodily 
vigor can make a long tour without a serious 
drain upon his physical and nervous energy. 
Mr. Bryan used to refer with delight to the 
manner in which Republicans he met, unable 
to pay him any other compliment, expressed 
their admiration for his magnificent constitu- 
tion, which made it possible for him to speak 
so constantly without injury to his health. 



200 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

The fatiguing journeys, the enforced adjust- 
ment to the crowds of varying size in circum- 
stances never twice ahke, the handshaking and 
the conferences with local committees to which 
prominent speakers must submit make speak- 
ing-tours anything but the triumphal excursions 
they appear to be to the cheering audiences. 
The weary orator arrives at a town to find 
that instead of snatching an hour's rest he must 
yield to the importunity of a committee in- 
trusted with the responsibility of showing him 
the sights of the city, with probably a few brief 
speeches at factories; and after a dinner, where 
he will very likely be called upon to say "just 
a few words," he must ride in a procession 
through the chill night before he addresses the 
big meeting. One of the most successful of 
Western campaigners is Thomas R. Marshall, 
of Indiana, twice Mr. Wilson's running mate 
on the presidential ticket. In 1908 Mr. Mar- 
shall was the Democratic candidate for governor 
and spoke in every county in the State, avoiding 
the usual partisan appeals, but preaching a 
political gospel of good cheer, with the result 
that he was elected by a plurality of 14,453, 
while Mr. Taft won the State's electoral vote 
by a plurality of 10,731. Mr. Marshall enjoys 
a wide reputation as a story-teller, both for the 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 201 

humor of his narratives and the art be brings 
to their recital. 

A few dashes of local color assist in establish- 
ing the visiting orator on terms of good-fellow- 
ship with his audience. He will inform himself 
as to the number of broom-handles or refriger- 
ators produced annually in the town, or the 
amount of barley and buckwheat that last year 
rewarded the toilof the noble husbandmen of 
the county. It is equally important for him to 
take counsel of the local chairman as to things 
to avoid^ for there are sore spots in many dis- 
tricts which must be let alone or touched with a 
healing hand. The tyro who prepares a speech 
with the idea of giving it through a considerable 
territory finds quickly that the sooner he for- 
gets his manuscript the better, so many are the 
concessions he must make to local conditions. 

In the campaign of 1916 the Democrats made 
strenuous efforts to win the Progressive vote. 
Energetic county chairmen would lure as many 
Progressives as possible to the front seats at all 
meetings that they might learn of the admira- 
tion in which they were held by forward-looking 
Democrats — the bond of sympathy, the com- 
mon ideals, that animated honest Democrats 
and their brothers, those patriotic citizens who, 
long weary of Republican indifference to the 



202 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

rights of freemen, had broken the ties of a life- 
time to assert their independence. Democratic 
orators, with the Progressives in mind, fre- 
quently apostrophized Lincoln, that they might 
the better contrast the vigorous, healthy Re- 
publicanism of the '60's with the corrupt, 
odious thing the Republican party had become. 
This, of course, had to be done carefully, so that 
the Progressive would not experience twinges of 
homesickness for his old stamping-ground. 

There is agreement among political managers 
as to the doubtful value of the "monster meet- 
ings" that are held in large centres. With 
plenty of money to spend and a thorough or- 
ganization, it is always possible to ''pull oflF" 
a big demonstration. Word passed to ward 
and precinct committeemen will collect a vast 
crowd for a parade adorned with fireworks. 
The size and enthusiasm of these crowds is 
never truly significant of party strength. One 
such crowd looks very much like another, and I 
am betraying no confidence in saying that its 
units are often drawn from the same sources. 
The participants in a procession rarely hear the 
speeches at the meeting of which they are the 
advertisement. When they reach the hall it 
is usually filled and their further function is to 
march down the aisles with bands and drum- 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 203 

corps to put the crowd in humor for the speeches. 
Frequently some belated phalanx will noisily 
intrude after the orator has been introduced, 
and he must smile and let it be seen that he 
understands perfectly that the interruption is 
due to the irrepressible enthusiasm of the in- 
telligent voters of the grand old blank district 
that has never failed to support the principles 
of the grand old blank party. 

The most satisfactory meetings are small 
ones, in country districts, where one or two hun- 
dred people of all parties gather, drawn by an 
honest curiosity as to the issues. Such meetings 
impose embarrassments upon the speaker, who 
must accommodate manner and matter to au- 
ditors disconcertingly close at hand, of whose 
reaction to his talk he is perfectly conscious. 
In an "'all-day" meeting, held usually in groves 
that serve as rural social centres, the farmers 
remain in their automobiles drawn into line 
before the speakers' stand, and listen quietly 
to the programme arranged by the county chair- 
man. Sometimes several orators are provided 
for the day ; Republicans may take the morning, 
the Democrats the afternoon. Here, with the 
audience sitting as a jury, we have one of the 
processes of democracy reduced to its simplest 
terms. 



204 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

The West is attracted by statesmen who are 
"'human," who impress themselves upon the 
Folks by their amiabihty and good-fellowship. 
Benjamin Harrison was recognized as one of 
the ablest lawyers of the bar of his day, but he 
was never a popular hero and his defeat for re- 
election was attributable in large degree to his 
lack of those qualities that constitute what I 
have called "folksiness." In the campaign 
of 1888 General Harrison suflFered much from 
the charge that he was an aristocrat, and at- 
tention was frequently called to the fact that 
he was the grandson of a President. Among 
other cartoons of the period there was one that 
represented Harrison as a pigmy standing in 
the shadow of his grandfather's tall hat. This 
was probably remembered by an Indiana politi- 
cian who called at the White House repeatedly 
without being able to see the President. After 
several fruitless visits the secretary said to him 
one day: "The President cannot be seen." 
"'My God!" exclaimed the enraged office- 
seeker, "'has he grown as small as that.^" 

Probably no President has ever enjoyed 
greater personal popularity than Mr. McKin- 
ley. He would perform an act of kindness with 
a graciousness that doubled its value and he 
could refuse a favor without making an enemy. 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 205 

Former Governor Glynn of New York told me 
not long ago an incident illuminative of the 
qualities that endeared Mr. McKinley to his 
devoted followers. Soon after his inaugura- 
tion a Democratic congressman from an East- 
ern State delivered in the House a speech filled 
with the bitterest abuse of the President. A 
little later this member's wife, not realizing 
that a savage attack of this sort would naturally 
make its author persona non grata at the White 
House, expressed a wish to take her young 
children to call on the President. The young- 
sters were insistent in their demand to make the 
visit and would not be denied. The offending 
representative confessed his embarrassment to 
Mr. Glynn, a Democratic colleague, who said 
he'd "feel out" the President. Mr. McKinley, 
declaring at once with the utmost good humor 
that he would be delighted to receive the lady 
and her children, named a day and met them 
with the greatest cordiality. He planted the 
baby on his desk to play, put them all at ease, 
and as they left distributed among them a huge 
bouquet of carnations that he had ordered 
specially from the conservatory. In this con- 
nection I am reminded of a story of Thomas B. 
Reed, who once asked President Harrison to 
appoint a certain constituent collector at Port- 



206 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

land. The appointment went to another candi- 
date for the office, and when one of Reed's 
friends twitted him about his lack of influence 
he remarked: "There are only two men in the 
whole State of Maine who hate me: one of 
them I landed in the penitentiary, and the other 
one Harrison has appointed collector of the port 
in my town !" 



Ill 

Statesmen of the "picturesque" school, who 
attracted attention by their scorn of conven- 
tions, or their raciness of speech, or for some 
obsession aired on every occasion, are well-nigh 
out of the picture. The West is not Without its 
sensitiveness, and it has found that a sockless 
congressman, or one who makes himself ridicu- 
lous by advocating foolish measures, reflects 
upon the intelligence of his constituents or upon 
their sense of humor, and if there is anything the 
West prides itself upon it is its humor. We are 
seeing fewer statesmen of the type so blithely 
represented by Mr. Cannon, who enjoy in 
marked degree the affections of their constit- 
uents; who are kindly uncles to an entire dis- 
trict, not to be displaced, no matter what their 
shortcomings, without genuine grief. One is 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 207 

tempted far afield in pursuit of the elements of 
popularity, of which the West offers abundant 
material for analysis. "Dan" Voorhees, "the 
tall sycamore of the Wabash," was prominent 
in Indiana politics for many years, and his fine 
figure, his oratorical gifts, his sympathetic 
nature and reputation for generosity endeared 
him to many who had no patience with his 
politics. He was so effective as an advocate 
in criminal cases that the Indiana law giving 
defendants the final appeal was changed so that 
the State might counteract the influence of 
his familiar speech, adjustable to any case, 
which played upon the sympathy and magna- 
nimity of the jurors. Allen G. Thurman, of 
Ohio, a man of higher intellectual gifts, was 
similarly enshrined in the hearts of his con- 
stituency. His bandanna was for years the 
symbol of Buckeye democracy, much as "blue 
jeans" expressed the rugged simplicity of the 
Hoosier democracy when, in 1876, the apparel 
of James D. Williams, unwisely ridiculed by the 
Republicans, contributed to his election to the 
governorship over General Harrison, the "kid- 
glove" candidate. Kansas was much in evi- 
dence in those years when it was so ably repre- 
sented in the Senate by the brilliant John J. 
Ingalls. Ingalls's oratory was enriched by a 



208 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

fine scholarship and enhvened by a rare gift of 
humor and a biting sarcasm. Once when a 
Pennsylvania colleague attacked Kansas Ingalls 
delivered a slashing reply. "Mr. President," 
he said, *' Pennsylvania has produced but two 
great men: Benjamin Franklin, of Massa- 
chusetts, and Albert Gallatin, of Switzerland." 
On another occasion Voorhees of the blond 
mane aroused Ingalls's ire and the Kansan 
excoriated the Hoosier in a characteristic de- 
liverance, an incident thus neatly epitomized 
by Eugene F. Ware, ("Ironquill"), a Kansas 
poet: 

"Cyclone dense. 
Lurid air, i 
Wabash hair. 
Hide on fence." 

Nothing is better calculated to encourage 
humility in young men about to enter upon a 
political career than a study of the roster of 
Congress for years only lightly veiled in ''the 
pathos of distance." Among United States 
senators from the Middle West in 1863-9 were 
Lyman Trumbull, Richard J. Oglesby, and Rich- 
ard Yates, of Illinois; Henry S. Lane, Oliver P. 
Morton, and Thomas A. Hendricks, of Indiana; 
James Harlan and Samuel J. Kirk wood, of 
Iowa; Samuel C. Pomeroy and James H. Lane, 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 209 

of Kansas; Zachariah Chandler and Jacob M. 
Howard, of Michigan; Alexander Ramsey and 
Daniel S. Norton, of Minnesota; Benjamin F. 
Wade and John Sherman, of Ohio. 

In the lower house sat Elihu B. Washburne, 
Owen Lovejoy, and William R. Morrison, of 
Illinois; Schuyler Colfax, George W. Julian, 
Daniel W. Voorhees, William S. Holman, and 
Godlove S. Orth, of Indiana; William B. Alli- 
son, Josiah B. Grinnell, John A. Kasson, and 
James F. Wilson, of Iowa; James A. Garfield, 
Rutherford B. Hayes, and Robert C. Schenck, 
of Ohio. In the same group of States in the 
'80's we find David Davis, John A. Logan, 
Joseph E. McDonald, Benjamin Harrison, 
Thomas W. Ferry, Henry P. Baldwin, Wilham 
Windom, Samuel J. R. McMillan, Algernon S. 
Paddock, Alvin Saunders, M. H. Carpenter, 
John J. Ingalls, and Preston B. Plumb, all 
senators in Congress. In this same period the 
Ohio delegation in the lower house included 
Benjamin Butterworth, A. J. Warner, Thomas 
Ewing, Charles Foster, Frank H. Hurd, J. War- 
ren Keifer, and William McKinley. 

How many students in the high schools and 
colleges of these States would recognize any 
considerable number of these names or have any 
idea of the nature of the public service these 



210 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

men performed? To be sure, three representa- 
tives in Congress from Ohio in the years indi- 
cated, and one senator from Indiana, reached 
the White House; but at least two-thirds of 
the others enjoyed a wide reputation, either 
as poHticians or statesmen or as both. In the 
years preceding the Civil War the West cer- 
tainly did not lack leadership, nor did all who 
rendered valuable service attain conspicuous 
place. For example, George W. Julian, an 
ardent foe of slavery, a member of Congress, 
and in 1852 a candidate for Vice-President on 
the Free Soil ticket, was a political idealist, in- 
dependent and courageous, and with the ability 
to express his opinions tersely and effectively. 

It is always hazardous to compare the states- 
men of one period with those of another, and 
veteran observers whose judgments must be 
treated with respect insist that the men I have 
mentioned Were not popularly regarded in their 
day as the possessors of unusual abilities. 
Most of these men were prominent in my youth, 
and in some cases were still important factors 
when I attained my majority, and somehow 
they seem to "mass" as their successors do not. 
The fierce passions aroused in the Middle West 
by the slavery issue undoubtedly brought into 
the political arena men who in calmer times 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 211 

would have remained contentedly in private 
life. The restriction of slavery and the preserva- 
tion of the Union were concrete issues that 
awakened a moral fervor not since apparent in 
our politics. Groups of people are constantly 
at work in the social field, to improve municipal 
government, or to place State politics upon a 
higher plane; but these movements occasion 
only slight tremors in contrast with the quaking 
of the earth through the free-soil agitation. 
Civil War, and reconstruction. 

The men I have mentioned were, generally 
speaking, poor men, and the next generation 
found it much more comfortable and profitable 
to practise law or engage in business than to 
enter politics. I am grieved by my inability 
to offer substantial proof that ideals of public 
service in the Western provinces are higher than 
they were fifty or twenty years ago. I record 
my opinion that they are not, and that we are 
less ably served in the Congress than formerly, 
frankly to invite criticism; for these times call 
for a great searching for the weaknesses of de- 
mocracy and, if the best talent is not finding 
its way into the lawmaking, administrative, and 
judicial branches of our State and federal gov- 
ernments, an obligation rests upon every citizen 
to find the reason and supply the remedy. 



^12 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

No Westerner who is devoted to the best in- 
terests of his country will encourage the behef 
that there is any real hostility between East 
and West, or that the West is incapable of view- 
ing social and poHtical movements in the light 
of reason and experience. It stood steadfastly 
against the extension of slavery and for the 
Union through years of fiery trial, and its 
leaders expressed the national thought and held 
the lines firm against opposition, concealed and 
open, that was kept down only by ceaseless 
vigilance. Even in times of financial stress it 
refused to hearken to the cry of the demagogue, 
and Greenbackism died, just as later Populism 
died. More significant was the failure of Mr. 
Bryan to win the support of the West that was 
essential to his success in three campaigns. We 
may say that it was a narrow escape, and that 
the Wqst was responsible for a serious menace 
and a peril not too easily averted, but Mr. 
Bryan precipitated a storm that was bound to 
break and that left the air clearer. He "threw 
a scare" into the country just when it needed 
to be aroused, and some of his admonitions have 
borne good fruit on soil least friendly to him. 

The West likes to be "preached at," and it 
admires a courageous evangelist even when it 
declines his invitation to the mourners' bench. 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 213 

The West liked and still likes Mr. Roosevelt, 
and no other American can so instantly gain the 
ear of the West as he. In my pilgrimages of 
the past year nothing has been more surprising 
than the change of tone with reference to the 
former President among Western Republicans, 
who declared in 1912 and reiterated in 1916 that 
never, never again would they countenance him.* 



IV 

One may find in the Mississippi valley, as in 
the Connecticut valley or anywhere else in 
America, just about what one wishes to find. 
A New England correspondent complains with 
some bitterness of the political conservatism he 
encountered in a journey through the West; 
he had expected to find radicalism everywhere 
rampant, and was disappointed that he was 
unable to substantiate his preconceived impres- 
sion by actual contacts with the people. 

If I may delicately suggest the point without 
making too great a concession, the West is really 
quite human. It has its own "slant" — its 
tastes and preferences that differ in ways from 
those of the East, the South, or the farther 
West; and radicals are distributed through the 
corn belt in about the same proportion as else- 

* Colonel Roosevelt died January 6, 1919. 



214 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

where. The bread-and-butter Western Folks 
are pretty sensible, taken in the long run, and 
not at all anxious to pull down the social pillars 
just to make a noise. They will impiously carve 
them a little — yes, and occasionally stick an in- 
congruous patch on the wall of the sanctuary 
of democracy; but they are never wilfully de- 
structive. And it cannot be denied that some 
of their architectural and decorative efforts have 
improved the original design. The West has 
saved other sections a good deal of trouble by 
boldly experimenting with devices it had 
"'thought up" amid the free airs of the plains; 
but the West, no more than the East, will give 
storage to a contrivance that has been proved 
worthless. 

The vindictive spirit that was very marked in 
the Western attitude toward the railroads for 
many years was not a gratuitous and unfounded 
hatred of corporations, but had a real basis in 
discriminations that touched vitally the life 
of the farmer and the struggling towns to which 
he carried his products. The railroads were the 
only corporations the West knew before the 
great industrial development. A railroad rep- 
resented *' capital," and "capital" was there- 
fore a thing to chastise whenever opportunity 
offered. It has been said in bitterness of late 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 215 

that the hostile legislation demanded by the 
West ** ruined the railroads." This is not a 
subject for discussion here, but it can hardly be 
denied that the railroads invited the war that 
was made uporu them by injustices and dis- 
criminations of which the obscure shipper "had a 
right to complain. The antagonism to rail- 
roads inspired a great deal of radicalism aimed 
at capital generally, and "corporate greed," 
"the encroachments of capital," "the money 
devils of Wall Street," and "special privilege" 
burned fiercely in our political terjuinology. 
Our experiment with government control as a 
war measure has, of course, given a new twist 
to the whole transportation problem. 

The West likes to play with novelties. It has 
been hospitable to such devices as the initia- 
tive, the referendum, and the recall, multiplied 
agencies for State supervision in many directions, 
and it has shown in general a confidence in auto- 
matic machinery popularly designed to correct 
all evils. The West probably infected the rest 
of the country with the fallacy that the pass- 
ing of a law is a complete transaction with- 
out reference to its enforcement, and Western 
statute-books are littered with legislation often 
frivolous or ill considered. There has, how- 
ever, been a marked reaction and the demand 



216 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

is rather for less legislation and better adminis- 
tration. A Western governor said to me de- 
spairingly that his State is "commissioned" to 
death, and that he is constantly embarrassed 
by the difficulty of persuading competent men to 
accept places on his many bipartisan regulative 
boards. 

There is a virtue in our very size as a nation 
and the multiplicity of interests represented by 
the one hundred million that make it possible 
for the majority to watch, as from a huge am- 
phitheatre, the experiments in some particular 
arena. A new agrarian movement that origi- 
nated in North Dakota in 1915 has attained for- 
midable proportions. The Non-Partisan League 
(it is really a political party) seems to have 
sprung full-panoplied from the Equity Society, 
and is a successor of the Farmers' Alliance and 
Populism. The despised middleman was the 
first object of its animosity, and it began with a 
comprehensive programme of State-owned ele- 
vators and flour-mills, packing-houses and cold- 
storage plants. The League carried North 
Dakota in 1916, electing a governor who imme- 
diately vetoed a bill providing for a State-owned 
terminal elevator because the League leaders 
"raised their sights" as soon as they got into 
the trenches. They demanded unlimited bond- 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 217 

mg-power and a complete new programme em- 
bodying a radical form of State socialism. 
"Class struggle," says Mr. Elmer T. Peterson, 
an authority on the League's history, "is the 
key-note of its propaganda." The student of 
current political tendencies will do well to keep 
an eye on the League, as it has gained a strong 
foothold in the Northwest, and the co-operative 
features of its platform satisfy an old craving 
of the farmer for State assistance in the manage- 
ment of his business. 

The League is now thoroughly organized in 
the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana, 
Idaho, and Colorado and is actively at work 
in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. 
Governor Burnquist of Minnesota addressed a 
letter to its executive secretary during the 
primary campaign last summer in which he said : 



At the time of our entrance into the European con- 
flict your organization condemned our government for 
entering the war. When it became evident that this 
course would result in disaster for their organization they 
changed their course and made an eleventh-hour claim to 
pure loyalty, but notwithstanding this claim the National 
Non-Partisan League is a party of discontent. It has 
drawn to it the pro-German element of our State. Its 
leaders have been closely connected with the lawless 
I. W. W. and with Red Socialists. Pacifists and peace 
advocates whose doctrines are of benefit to Germany are 
among their number. 



218 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

The League's activities in obstructing con- 
scription and other war measures have been 
the subject of investigation by mihtary and 
civil authorities. The Leader, the official organ 
of the party, recently printed, heavily capital- 
ized, this sentiment, ''The Government of the 
People by the Rascals for the Rich, " as the key- 
note of its hostility to America's participation 
in the war. 

The West is greatly given to sober second 
thoughts. Hospitable to new ideas as it has 
proved itself to be, it will stop short of a leap 
in the dark. There is a point at which it be- 
comes extremely conservative. It will run like 
a frightened rabbit from some change which it 
has encouraged. But the West has a passion 
for social justice, and is willing to make sacri- 
fices to gain it. The coming of the war found 
this its chief concern, not under the guidance of 
feverish agitators but from a sense that de- 
mocracy, to fulfil its destiny, must make the 
conditions of life happy and comfortable for 
the great body of the people. It is not the "pee- 
pul" of the demagogue who are to be reckoned 
with in the immediate future of Western political 
expression, but an intelligent, earnest citizenry, 
anxious to view American needs with the new 
vision compelled by the world struggle in the 
defense of democracy. 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 219 

The rights and privileges of citizenship long 
enjoj^ed by women of certain Western States 
ceased to be a vagary of the untutored wilds 
when last year New York adopted a constitu- 
tional amendment granting women the ballot. 
The fight for a federal amendment was won in 
the House last winter by a narrow margin, but 
at this writing the matter is still pending in the 
Senate. Many of the old arguments against 
the enfranchisement of women have been pretty 
eflPectually disposed of in States that were pio- 
neers in general suffrage. I lived for three years 
in Colorado without being conscious of any of 
those disturbances to domesticity that we used 
to be told would follow if women were projected 
into politics. I can testify that a male voter 
may register and cast his ballot without any feel- 
ing that the women he encounters as he per- 
forms these exalted duties have reHnquished 
any of the ancient prerogatives of their woman- 
hood. 

There is nothing in the experience of suffrage 
States to justify a suspicion that women are 
friendlier to radical movements than men, but 
much to sustain the assertion that they take 
their politics seriously and are as intelligent in 
the exercise of the ballot as male voters. The 
old notion that the enfranchisement of women 
would double the vote without changing results 



mo THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

is another fallacy; I am disposed to think them 
more independent than their male fellow citizens 
and less likely to submit meekly to party dicta- 
tion. 

Inpractically every American court-and State- 
house and city hall there are women holding 
responsible clerical positions, and, if the keeping 
of important records may be intrusted to women, 
the task of defending their exclusion from elec- 
tive offices is one that I confess to be beyond 
my powers. Nor is there anything shocking in 
the presence of a woman on the floor of a legis- 
lative body. Montana sent a woman to the 
national Congress, and already her fellow mem- 
bers hear her voice without perturbation. Mrs. 
Agnes Riddle, a member of the Colorado Senate, 
is a real contributor, I shall not scruple to say, 
to the intelligence and wisdom of that body. 
Mrs. Riddle, apart from being a stateswoman, 
manages a dairy to its utmost details, and dur- 
ing the session answers the roll-call after doing a 
pretty full day's work on her farm. The schools 
of Colorado are admirably conducted by Mrs. 
C. C. Bradford, who has thrice been re-elected 
superintendent of public instruction. The dep- 
uty attorney-general of Colorado, Miss Clara 
Ruth Mozzor, sits at her desk as composedly as 
though she were not the first woman to gain 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 221 

this political and professional recognition in the 
Centennial Commonwealth. I am moved to 
ask whether we shall not find for the enfranchised 
woman who becomes active in public affairs 
some more felicitous and gallant term than 
politician — a word much soiled from long appli- 
cation to the corrupt male, and perhaps the 
Federation of Women's Clubs will assist in 
this matter. 



As the saying became trite, almost before 
news of our entrance into the world war had 
reached the nation's farthest borders, that we 
should emerge from the conflict a new and a 
very different America, it becomes of interest 
to keep in mind the manner and the spirit in 
which we entered into the mighty struggle. It 
was not merely in the mind of people everywhere, 
on the 2d of April, 1917, that the nation was face 
to face with a contest that would tax its powers 
to the utmost, but that our internal affairs would 
be subjected to serious trial, and that parties 
and party policies would inevitably experience 
changes of greatest moment before another gen- 
eral election. When this is read the congres- 
sional campaign will be gathering headway; 



222 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

as I write, public attention is turning, rather 
impatiently it must be said, to the prospects of 
a campaign that is likely to pursue its course to 
the accompaniment of booming cannon over- 
seas. How much the conduct of the war by 
the administration in power will figure in the 
pending contest is not yet apparent; but as 
the rapid succession of events following Mr. 
Wilson's second inauguration have dimmed 
the issues of 1916, it may be well to summarize 
the respective attitudes of the two major 
parties two years ago to establish a point of 
orientation. 

It was the chief Republican contention that 
the Democratic administration had failed to 
preserve the national honor and security in its 
dealings with Mexico and Germany. As politi- 
cal platforms are soon forgotten, it may be of 
interest to reproduce this paragraph of the 
Republican declaration of 1916: 

The present administration has destroyed our influence 
abroad and humiliated us in our own eyes. The Repub- 
lican party believes that a firm, consistent, and courageous 
foreign policy, always maintained by Republican Presi- 
dents in accordance with American traditions, is the best, 
as it is the only true way to preserve our peace and re- 
store us to our rightful place among the nations. We be- 
lieve in the pacific settlement of international disputes 
and favor the establishment of a world court for that 
purpose. 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 223 

The concluding sentence is open to the criti- 
cism that it weakens what precedes it; but the 
Mexican plank, after denouncing "the inde- 
fensible methods of interference employed by 
this administration in the internal affairs of 
Mexico," promises to "our citizens on and near 
our border, and to those in Mexico, wherever 
they may be found, adequate and absolute 
protection in their lives, liberty, and property." 

General Pershing had launched his punitive 
expedition on Mexican soil in March, and the 
Democratic platform adopted at St. Louis in 
June justifies this move; but it goes on to add: 

Intervention, implying as it does military subjugation, 
is revolting to the people of the United States, notwith- 
standing the provocation to that cx)urse has been great, 
and should be resorted to, if at all, only as a last resort. 
The stubborn resistance of the President and his advisers 
to every demand and suggestion to enter upon it, is 
creditable alike to them and to the people in whose name 
he speaks. 

As to Germany, this paragraph of the Demo- 
cratic platform might almost have been written 
into President Wilson's message to Congress of 
April 2, 1917, so clearly does it set forth the 
spirit in which America entered into the war: 

We believe that every people has the right to choose 
the sovereignty under which it shall live; that the small 
states of the world have a right to enjoy from other na- 



224 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

tions the same respect for their sovereignty and for their 
territorial integrity that great and powerful nations ex- 
pect and insist upon, and that the world has a right to 
be free from every disturbance of its peace that has its 
origin in aggression or disregard of the rights of peoples 
and nations, and we believe that the time has come when 
it is the duty of the United States to join with the other 
nations of the world in any feasible association that will 
effectively serve these principles, to maintain inviolate 
the complete security of the highway of the seas for the 
common and unhindered use of all nations. 

The impression was very general in the East 
that the West was apathetic or indifferent both 
as to the irresponsible and hostile acts of Mex- 
icans and the growing insolence of the Imperial 
German Government with reference to American 
rights on the seas. Any such assumption was 
unfair at the time, and has since been disproved 
by the promptness and vigor with which the 
West responded to the call to arms. But the 
West had no intention of being stampeded. A 
Democratic President whose intellectual proc- 
esses and manner of speech were radically dif- 
ferent from those at least of his immediate pred- 
ecessors, was exercising a Lincoln-like patience 
in his efforts to keep the country out of war. 
From the time the Mexican situation became 
threatening one might meet anywhere in the 
West Republicans who thought that the honor 
and security of the nation were being trifled 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 225 

with; that the President's course was incon- 
sistent and vacillating; and even that we 
should have whipped Mexico into subjection 
and maintained an army on her soil until a 
stable government had been established. These 
views were expressed in many parts of the West 
by men of influence in Republican councils, and 
there were Democrats who held like opinions. 
The Republicans were beset by two great 
difficulties when the national convention met. 
The first of these was to win back the Progres- 
sives who had broken with the party and con- 
tributed to the defeat of Mr. Taft in 1912; the 
second was the definition of a concrete policy 
touching Germany and Mexico that would ap- 
peal to the patriotic voter, without going the 
length of threatening war. The standpatters 
were in no humor to make concessions to the 
Progressives, who, in another part of Chicago, 
were unwilHng to receive the olive-branch ex- 
cept on their own terms. Denied the joy of 
Mr. Roosevelt's enlivening presence to create a 
high moment, the spectators were aware of his 
ability to add to the general gloom by his tele- 
gram suggesting Senator Lodge as a compromise 
candidate acceptable to the Progressives. The 
speculatively inclined may wonder what would 
have happened if in one of the dreary hours of 



226 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

waiting Colonel Roosevelt had walked upon 
the platform and addressed the convention. 
Again, those who have leisure for political soli- 
taire may indulge in reflections as to whether 
Senator Lodge would not have appealed to the 
West quite as strongly as Mr. Hughes. The 
West, presumably, was not interested in Senator 
Lodge, though I timidly suggest that if a New 
Jersey candidate can be elected and re-elected 
with the aid of the West, Massachusetts need not 
so modestly hang in the background when a 
national convention orders the roll-call of the 
States for favorite sons. 

There was little question at any time from 
the hour the convention opened that Mr. 
Hughes would be the nominee, and I believe 
it is a fair statement that he was the candidate 
the Democrats feared most. The country had 
formed a good opinion of him as a man of inde- 
pendence and courage, and, having strictly ob- 
served the silence enjoined by his position on 
the bench during the Republican family quar- 
rel of four years earlier, he was looked upon as a 
candidate well fitted to rally the Progressives 
and lead a united party to victory. 

The West waited and listened. While it had 
seemed a ''safe play" for the Republicans to 
attack the Democratic administration for its 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 227 

course with Mexico and Germany, the presenta- 
tion of the case to the people was attended with 
serious embarrassments. The obvious alter- 
native of Mr. Wilson's poHcy was war. The 
West was not at all anxious for war; it certainly 
did not want two wars. If war could be averted 
by negotiation the West was in a mood to be 
satisfied with that solution. Republican cam- 
paigners were aware of the danger of arraigning 
the administration for not going to war and 
contented themselves with attacks upon what 
they declared to be a shifty and wobbly policy. 
The West's sense of fair play was, I think, roused 
by the vast amount of destructive criticism 
launched against the administration unaccom- 
panied by any constructive programme. The 
President had grown in public respect and con- 
fidence; the West had seen and heard him since 
he became a national figure, and he did not 
look or talk like a man who would out of sheer 
contrariness trifle with the national security 
and honor. It may be said with truth that the 
average Western Democrat was not "keen" 
about Mr. Wilson when he first loomed as a 
presidential possibility. I heard a good deal 
of discussion by Western Democrats of Mr. 
Wilson's availability in 1910-11, and he was 
not looked upon with favor. He was **dif- 



228 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

ferent"; he didn't invoke the Democratic gods 
in the old famiHar phraseology, and he was 
suspected of entertaining narrow views as to 
*' spoils," such as caused so much heartache 
among the truly loyal in Mr. Cleveland's two ad- 
ministrations. 

The Democratic campaign slogan, "He has 
kept us out of war!" was not met with the 
definite challenge that he should have got us into 
war. Jingoism was well muffled. What passed 
for apathy was really a deep concern as to the 
outcome of our pressing international diflScul- 
ties, an anxiety to weigh the points at issue 
soberly. Western managers constantly warned 
visiting orators to beware of "abusing the op- 
position," as there were men and women of all 
political faiths in the audiences. Both sides 
were timid where the German vote was con- 
cerned, the Democrats alarmed lest the "strict 
accountability" attitude of the President toward 
the Imperial German Government would dam- 
age the party's chances, and the Republicans 
embarrassed by the danger of openly appealing 
to the hyphenates when the Republican cam- 
paign turned upon an arraignment of the Presi- 
dent for not dealing drastically enough with 
German encroachment upon American rights. 
In view of the mighty sweep of events since the 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 229 

election, all this seems tame and puerile, and 
reminds us that there is a vast amount of punk 
in politics. 

In the West there are no indications that an 
effect of the war will be to awaken new radical 
movements or strengthen tendencies that were 
apparent before America sounded the call to 
arms. I have dwelt upon the sobriety with 
which the West approached the election of 1916 
merely as an emphasis of this. We shall have 
once more a ''soldier vote" to reckon with in 
our politics, and the effect of their participa- 
tion in the world struggle upon the young men 
who have crossed the sea to fight for democracy 
is an interesting matter for speculation. One 
thing certain is that the war has dealt the 
greatest blow ever administered to American 
sectionahsm. We were prone for years to 
consider our national life in a local spirit, and 
the poHtical parties expended much energy 
in attempts to reconcile the demands and needs 
of one division of the States with those of an- 
other. The prolonged debate of the tariff as 
a partisan issue is a noteworthy instance of 
this. The farmer, the industrial laborer, the 
capitalist have all been the objects of special 
consideration. One argument had to be pre- 
pared for the cotton-grower in the South; 



230 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

another for the New England mill-hands who 
spun his product; still another for the mill- 
owner. The farm-hand and the mechanic in 
the neighboring manufacturing town had to 
be reached by different lines of reasoning. Our 
statesmanship, East and West, has been of the 
knot-hole variety — rarely has a man risen to the 
top of the fence for a broad view of the whole 
field. What will be acceptable to the South .^ 
What does the West want ? We have had this 
sort of thing through many years, both as to 
national policies and as to candidates for the 
presidency, and its effect has been to prevent 
the development of sound national policies. 

The Republican party has addressed itself 
energetically to the business of reorganization. 
The national committee met at St. Louis in 
February to choose a new chairman in place of 
Mr. William R. Willcox, and the contest for 
this important position was not without its 
significance. The standpatters yielded under 
pressure, and after a forty-eight-hour deadlock 
the election of Mr. Will H. Hays, of Indiana, 
assured a hospitable open-door policy toward 
all prodigals. In 1916 Mr. Hays, as chairman 
of the Republican State committee, carried In- 
diana against heavy odds and established him- 
self as one of the ablest political managers the 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 231 

West has known. As the country is likely to 
hear a good deal of him in the next two years, 
I may note that he is a man of education, high- 
minded, resourceful, endowed with prodigious 
energy and trained and tested executive ability. 
A lawyer in a town of five thousand people, he 
served his political apprenticeship in all capaci- 
ties from precinct committeeman to the State 
chairmanship. Mr. Hays organized and was 
the first chairman of the Indiana State Council 
of Defense, and made it a thoroughly effective 
instrument for the co-ordination of the State's 
war resources and the diffusion of an ardent 
patriotism. Indeed the methods of the Indiana 
Council were so admirable that they were 
adopted by several other States. It is in the 
blood of all Hoosiers to suspect partisan mo- 
tives where none exists, but it is to Mr. Hays's 
credit that he directed Indiana's war work, un- 
til he resigned to accept the national chairman- 
ship, with the support and to the satisfaction 
of every loyal citizen without respect to party. 
Mr. Hays is essentially a Westerner, with the 
original Wabash tang; and his humor and a 
knack of coining memorable phrases are not 
the least important items of his equipment for 
politics. He is frank and outspoken, with no 
aflFectations of mystery, and as his methods are 



232 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

conciliatory and assimilative the chances are 
excellent for a Republican rejuvenation. 

The burden of prosecuting the war to a con- 
clusive peace that shall realize the American 
aims repeatedly set forth by President Wilson is 
upon the Democratic administration. The West 
awaits with the same seriousness with which it 
pondered the problems of 1916 the definition 
of new issues touching vitally our social, in- 
dustrial, and financial affairs, and our relations 
with other nations, that will press for attention 
the instant the last shot is fired. In the mid- 
summer of 1918 only the most venturesome 
political prophets are predicting either the 
issues or the leaders of 1920. Events which it 
is impossible to forecast will create issues and 
possibly lift up new leaders not now prominent 
in national politics. A successful conclusion 
of the war before the national conventions meet 
two years hence would give President Wilson 
and his party an enormous prestige. On the 
other hand, if the war should be prolonged we 
shall witness inevitably the development of a 
sentiment for change based upon public anxiety 
to hasten the day of peace. These things are 
on the knees of the gods. 

In both parties there is to-day a melancholy 
deficiency of presidential timber. It cannot 



MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS 233 

be denied that Republican hopes, very gener- 
ally, are centred in Mr. Roosevelt; this is 
clearly apparent throughout the West. In the 
Democratic State convention held at Indian- 
apolis, June 18, tumultuous enthusiasm was 
awakened by the chairman, former Governor 
Samuel M. Ralston, who boldly declared for 
Wilson in 1920 — the first utterance of the 
kind before any body of like representative 
character. However, the immediate business 
of the nation is to win the war, and there is evi- 
dent in the West no disposition to suffer this pre- 
dominating issue to be obscured by partisan- 
ship. Indeed since America took up arms 
nothing has been more marked in the Western 
States than the sinking of partisanship in a 
whole-hearted support of the government and 
a generous response to all the demands of the 
war. In meetings called in aid of war causes 
Democrats and Republicans have vied with 
each other in protestations of loyalty to the 
government. I know of no exception to the 
rule that every request from Washington has 
been met splendidly by Republican State gov- 
ernors. Indeed, there has been a lively rivalry 
among Middle Western States to exceed the 
prescribed quotas of dollars and men. 

Already an effect of the war has been a closer 



234 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

knitting together of States and sections, a 
contemplation of wider horizons. It is inevi- 
table that we shall be brought, East and West, 
North and South, to the realization of a new 
national consciousness that has long been the 
imperative need of our politics. And in all the 
impending changes, readjustments, and con- 
ciliations the country may look for hearty co- 
operation to a West grown amazingly conserva- 
tive and capable of astonishing manifestations 
of independence. 



CHAPTER VI 
THE SPffilT OF THE WEST 

The wise know that fooHsh legislation is a rope of sand, which 
perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow, and not 
lead, the character and progress of the citizen; the strongest 
usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only who build on Ideas, 
build for eternity; and that the form of government which pre- 
vails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the popula- 
tion which permits it. — Emerson. 



MUCH water has flowed under the 
bridge since these papers were under- 
taken, and I cheerfully confess that 
in the course of the year I have learned a great 
deal about the West. My observations began 
at Denver when the land was still at peace, 
and continued through the hour of the momen- 
tous decision and the subsequent months of 
preparation. The West is a place of moods 
and its changes of spirit are sometimes puzzling. 
The violence has gone out of us; we went 
upon a war footing with a minimum amount of 
noise and gesticulation. Deeply preoccupied 
with other matters, the West was annoyed that 
the Kaiser should so stupidly make it necessary 
for the American Republic to give him a thrash- 

235 



236 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

ing, but as the thing had to be done the West 
addressed itself to the job with a grim determi- 
nation to do it thoroughly. 

We heard, after the election of 1916, that the 
result was an indication of the West's indiffer- 
ence to the national danger; that the Middle 
Western people could not be interested in a 
war on the farther side of the Atlantic and 
would suffer any indignities rather than send 
their sons to fight in Europe. It was charged 
in some quarters that the West had lost its 
''pep"; that the fibre had softened; that the 
children and the grandchildren of "Lincoln's 
men" were insensible to the national danger; 
and that thoughts of a bombardment of New 
York or San Francisco were not disturbing to a 
people remote from the sea. I am moved to 
remark that we of the West are less disposed to 
encourage the idea that we are a people apart 
than our friends to the eastward who often seem 
anxious to force this attitude upon us. We like 
our West and may boast and strut a little, but 
any intimation that we are not loyal citizens of 
the American Republic, jealous of its honor and 
security and responsive to its every call upon 
our patriotism and generosity, arouses our in- 
dignation. 

Many of us were favored in the first years of 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 237 

the war with letters from Eastern friends anx- 
ious to enhghten us as to America's danger 
and her duty with respect to the needs of the 
sufferers in the wake of battle. On a day when 
I received a communication from New York 
asking ''whether nothing could be done in 
Indiana to rouse the people to the sore need of 
France," a committee for French relief had just 
closed a week's campaign with a fund of $17,000, 
collected over the State in small sums and con- 
tributed very largely by school children. The 
Millers' Belgian Relief movement, initiated in 
the fall of 1914 by Mr. WilKam C. Edgar, of 
Minneapolis, publisher of The Northwestern 
Miller, affords a noteworthy instance of the 
West's response to appeals in behalf of the 
people in the trampled kingdom. A call was 
issued November 4 for 45,000 barrels of flour, 
but 70,000 barrels were contributed; and this 
cargo was augmented by substantial gifts of 
blankets, clothing for women and children, 
and condensed milk. These supplies were dis- 
tributed in Belgium under Mr. Edgar's per- 
sonal direction, in co-operation with Mr. Her- 
bert C. Hoover, chairman of the Commission 
for the ReHef of Belgium. 

Many Westerners were fighting under the 
British and French flags, or were serving in the 



238 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

French ambulance service before our entrance 
into the war, and the opening of the oflScers' 
training-camps in 1917 found young Westerners 
of the best type clamoring for admission. The 
Western colleges and universities cannot be too 
strongly praised for the patriotic fervor with 
which they met the crisis. One president said 
that if necessary he would nail up the doors 
of his college until the war was over. The eager- 
ness to serve is indicated in the Regular Army 
enlistments for the period from June to Decem- 
ber, 1917, in which practically all of the Mid- 
dle Western States doubled and tripled the 
quota fixed by the War Department; and any 
assumption that patriotism diminishes the 
farther we penetrate into the interior falls be- 
fore the showing of Colorado, whose response 
to a call for 1,598 men was answered by 3,793; 
and Utah multipHed her quota by 5 and Mon- 
tana by 7. This takes no account of men who, 
in the period indicated, entered training-camps, 
or of naval and marine enlistments, or of the 
National Guard or the selective draft. More 
completely than ever before the West is merged 
into the nation. The situation when war was 
declared is comparable to that of householders, 
long engrossed with their domestic affairs and 
heeding little the needs of the community, 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 239 

who are brought to the street by a common peril 
and confer soberly as to ways and means of 
meeting it. 

"The West," an Eastern critic complains, 
"appears always to be demanding something!" 
The idea of the West as an Oliver Twist with 
a plate insistently extended pleases me and I 
am unable to meet it with any plausible refuta- 
tion. The West has always wanted and it will 
continue to want and to ask for a great many 
things; we may only pray that it will more and 
more hammer upon the federal counter, not for 
appropriations but for things of value for the 
whole. "We will try anything once!" This 
for long was more or less the Western attitude 
in politics, but we seem to have escaped from 
it; and the war, with its enormous demands 
upon our resources, its revelation of national 
weaknesses, caused a prompt cleaning of the 
slate of old, unfinished business to await the out- 
come. 

It is an element of strength in a democracy 
that its political and social necessities are con- 
tinuing; there is no point of rest. Obstacles, 
differences, criticism are all a necessary part 
of the eternal struggle toward perfection. What 
was impossible yesterday is achieved to-day and 
may be abandoned to-morrow. Democracy, as 



£40 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

we have thus far practised it, is a series of ex- 
periments, a quest. 



II 

The enormous industrial development of the 
Middle West was a thing undreamed of by the 
pioneers, whose chief concern was with the soil; 
there was no way of anticipating the economic 
changes that have been forced upon attention 
by the growth of cities and States. Minne- 
sota had been a State thirteen years when in 
1871 Proctor Knott, in a speech in Congress, 
ridiculed the then unknown name of Duluth: 
'*The word fell upon my ear with a peculiar and 
indescribable charm, like the gentle murmur of 
a low fountain stealing forth in the midst of 
roses, or the soft, sweet accent of an angel's 
whisper in the bright, joyous dream of sleeping 
innocence." And yet Duluth has become in- 
deed a zenith city of the saltless seas, and the 
manufactured products of Minnesota have an 
annual value approximating $500,000,000. 

The first artisans, the blacksmiths and wagon- 
makers, and the women weaving cloth and 
fashioning the garments for their families in 
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, never 
dreamed that the manufactures of these States 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 241 

alone would attain a value of $5,500,000,000, 
approximately a fifth of the nation's total. The 
original social and economic structure was not 
prepared for this mighty growth. States in 
which the soil was tilled almost wholly by the 
owners of the land were unexpectedly confronted 
with social and economic questions foreign to all 
their experience. Rural legislators were called 
upon to deal with questions of which they had 
only the most imperfect understanding. They 
w^ere bewildered to find the towns nearest them, 
which had been only trading centres for the 
farmer, asking for legislation touching working 
hours, housing, and child labor, and for modifica- 
tions of local government made necessary by 
growth and radical changes in social conditions. 
I remember my surprise to find not long ago 
that a small town I had known all my life had 
become an industrial centre where the citizens 
were gravely discussing their responsibilities to 
the laborers who had suddenly been added to 
the population. 

The preponderating element in the original 
occupation of the Middle Western States was 
American, derived from the older States; and 
the precipitation into the Mississippi valley in- 
dustrial centres of great bodies of foreigner.su 
many of them only vaguely aware of the pur- 



242 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

poses and methods of democracy, added an ele- 
ment of confusion and peril to State and na- 
tional politics. The perplexities and dangers 
of municipal government were multiplied in the 
larger cities by the injection into the electorate 
of the hordes from overseas that poured into 
States whose government and laws had been 
fashioned to meet the needs of a homogeneous 
people who lived close to the soil. 

The war that has emphasized so many needs 
and dangers has sharply accentuated the grow- 
ing power of labor. Certain manifestations of 
this may no longer be viewed in the light of 
local disturbances and agitations but with an 
eye upon impending world changes. Whatever 
the questions of social and economic recon- 
struction that Europe must face, they will be 
hardly less acutely presented in America; and 
these matters are being discussed in the West 
with a reassuring sobriety. The Industrial 
Workers of the World has widely advertised it- 
self by its lawlessness, in recent years, and its 
obstructive tactics with respect to America's 
preparations for war have focussed attention 
upon it as an organization utterly inconsonant 
with American institutions. An arresting in- 
cident of recent years was the trial, in 1912, in 
the United States Court for the District of 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 243 

Indiana, of forty-two oflScers and members of 
the International Association of Structural Iron 
Workers for the dynamiting of buildings and 
bridges throughout the country. The trial 
lasted three months, and the disclosures, point- 
ing to a thoroughly organized conspiracy of de- 
struction, were of the most startHng character. 
Thirty-eight of the defendants were convicted. 
The influence of labor in the great industrial 
States of the West is very great, and not a negli- 
gible factor in the politics of the immediate 
future. What industrial labor has gamed has 
been through constant pressure of its organiza- 
tions; and yet the changes of the past fifty years 
have been so gradual as to present, in the retro- 
spect, the appearance of an evolution. 

There is little to support an assumption that 
the West in these critical hours will not take 
counsel of reason; and it is an interesting cir- 
cumstance that the West has just now no one 
who may be pointed to as its spokesman. No 
one is speaking for the West; the West has 
learned to think and to speak for itself. "Or- 
ganized emotion" (I believe the phrase is 
President Lowell's) may again become a power 
for mischief in these plains that lend so amiable 
an ear to the orator; but the new seriousness of 
which I have attempted to give some hint in 



244 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

the progress of these papers, and the increasing 
pohtieal independence of the Western people, 
encourage the behef that whatever hes before 
us in the way of momentous change, the West 
will not be led or driven to ill-considered action. 
In spite of many signs of a drift toward social 
democracy, individualism is still the dominant 
"note" in these Middle Western States, apart 
from the industrial centres where socialism has 
indisputably made great headway. It may be 
that American political and social phenomena 
are best observed in States whose earliest settle- 
ment is so recent as to form a background for 
contrast. We have still markedly in the Missis- 
sippi valley the individualistic point of view of 
the pioneer who thought out his problems alone 
and was restrained by pride from confessing his 
needs to his neighbors. In a region where 
capital has been most bitterly assaulted it has 
been more particularly in the pursuit of redress 
for local grievances. The agrarian attacks up- 
on railroads are an instance of this. The farmer 
wants quick and cheap access to markets, and 
he favors co-operative elevators because he has 
felt for years that the middleman poured too 
many grains out of the bushel for his services. 
In so far as the farmer's relations with the State 
are concerned, he has received from the govern- 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 245 

ment a great many things for which, broadly 
speaking, he has not asked, notably in the de- 
velopment of a greater efficiency of method 
and a widening of social horizons. 



Ill 

When the New Englander, the Southeasterner, 
and the Pennsylvanian met in the Ohio valley 
they spoke a common language and were ani- 
mated by common aims. Their differences 
were readily reconcilable; Southern sentiment 
caused tension in the Civil War period and was 
recognizable in politics through reconstruction 
and later, but it was possible for one to be 
classed as a Southern sympathizer or even to 
bear the opprobrious epithet of copperhead 
without having his fundamental Americanism 
questioned. Counties through this belt of 
States were named for American heroes and 
statesmen — Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, 
Hamilton, Marion, Clark, Perry — varied by 
French and Indian names that tinkle musically 
along lakes and rivers. 

There was never any doubt in the early days 
that all who came were quickly assimilated into 
the body of the republic, and certainly there 
was no fear that any conceivable situation could 



1 
246 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

ever cause the loyalty of the newly adopted 
citizen to be questioned. The soil was too 
young in the days of Knownothingism and the 
body of the population too soundly American 
for the West to be greatly roused by that 
movement. Nevertheless we have had in the 
West as elsewhere the political recognition of 
the race group — a particular consideration for 
the Irish vote or the German vote, and in the 
Northwestern States for the Scandinavian. The 
political "bosses" were not slow to throw their 
lines around the increasing race groups with a 
view to control and manipulation. Our political 
platforms frequently expressed "sympathy with 
the Irish people in their struggle for home rule," 
and it had always been considered "good poli- 
tics" to recognize the Irish and the Germans in 
party nominations. 

Following Germany's first hostile acts against 
American life and property, through the long 
months of waiting in which America hoped for a 
continuation of neutrality, we became conscious 
that the point of view held by citizens of Ameri- 
can stock differed greatly from that of many — 
of, indeed, the greater number — of our citizens 
of German birth or ancestry. Until America 
became directly concerned it was perfectly ex- 
plicable that they should sympathize with the 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 247 

people, if not with the government, of the Ger- 
man Empire. The Lusitania tragedy, defended 
in many cases openly by German sympathizers; 
the disclosure of the dupHcity of the German 
ambassador, and revelations of the insidious 
activity and ingenious propaganda that had been 
in progress under the guise of pacifism — all 
condoned by great numbers of German-Ameri- 
cans — brought us to a realization of the fact 
that even unto the third and fourth generation 
the fatherland still exercised its spell upon those 
we had accepted unquestioningly as fellow citi- 
zens. And yet, viewed in the retrospect, the 
phenomenon is not so remarkable. More than 
any other people who have enjoyed free access 
to the "unguarded gates," of which Aldrich 
complained many years ago, the Germans have 
settled themselves in both town and country in 
colonies. Intermarriage has been very general 
among them, and their social life has been cir- 
cumscribed by ancestral tastes and preferences. 
As they prospered they made frequent visits 
to Germany, strengthening ties never wholly 
broken. 

It was borne in upon us in the months follow- 
ing close upon the declaration of war against 
Germany, that many citizens of German birth, 
long enjoying the freedom and the opportunities 



us THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

of the Valley of Democracy, had not really been 
incorporated into the body of American citizen- 
ship, but were still, in varying degrees, loyal to 
the German autocracy. That in States we had 
proudly pointed to as typically American there 
should be open disloyalty or only a surly accep- 
tance of the American Government's position 
with reference to a hostile foreign Power was 
profoundly disturbing. That amid the perils 
of war Americanism should become the issue in 
a political campaign, as in Wisconsin last April, 
brought us face to face with the problem of a 
more thorough assimilation of those we have 
welcomed from the Old World — a problem 
which when the urgent business of winning the 
war has been disposed of, we shall not neglect 
if we are wise. Wisconsin nobly asserted her 
loyalty, and it should be noted further that her 
response in enlistments, in loan subscriptions, in 
contributions to the Red Cross and other war 
benevolences have been commensurate with her 
wealth and in keeping with her honorable record 
as one of the sturdiest of American common- 
wealths. The rest of America should know that 
as soon as Wisconsin realized that she had a prob- 
lem with reference to pro-Germanism, disguised 
or open, her greatly preponderating number of 
loyal citizens at once set to work to deal with the 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 249 

situation. It was met promptly and aggres- 
sively, and in the wide-spread campaign of 
education the University of Wisconsin took an 
important part. A series of pamphlets, straight- 
forward and unequivocal, written by members 
of the faculty and published by the State, 
set forth very clearly America's position and 
the menace to civilization of Germany's pro- 
gramme of f rightfulness. 

Governor Philipp, in a patriotic address at 
Sheboygan in May, on the seventieth anni- 
versary of Wisconsin's admission to the Union, 
after reviewing the State's war preparations, 
evoked great applause by these utterances: 

"There is a great deal said by some people 
about peace. Don't you permit yourselves to 
be led astray by men who come to you with 
some form of peace that they advocate that 
would be an everlasting disgrace to the American 
people. We cannot subscribe to any peace 
treaty, my friends, that does not include 
within its provisions an absolute and complete 
annihilation of the military autocracy that we 
have said to the world we are going to destroy. 
We have enlisted our soldiers with that under- 
standing. We have asked our boys to go to 
France to do that, and if we quit short of ful- 
fiUing that contract with our own soldiers, those 



250 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

boys on the battlefield will have given their 
lives in vain." 

In the present state of feeling it is impossible 
to weigh from available data the question of 
how far there was some sort of "understanding" 
between the government at Berlin and persons 
of German sympathies in the United States 
that when Der Tag dawned for the precipita- 
tion of the great scheme of world domination 
they would stand ready to assist by various 
processes of resistance and interference. For 
the many German-Americans who stood stead- 
fastly for the American cause at all times it is 
unfortunate that much testimony points to 
some such arrangement. At this time it is 
difficult to be just about this, and it is far from 
my purpose to support an indictment that is 
an affront to the intelligence and honor of the 
many for the offenses of scattered groups and 
individuals; and yet through fifty years Ger- 
man organizations, a German-language press, 
the teaching of German in public schools fos- 
tered the German spirit, and the efforts made to 
preserve the solidarity of the German people 
lend color to the charge. It cannot be denied 
that systematic German propaganda, either 
open or in pacifist guise, was at work ener- 
getically throughout the West from the begin- 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 251 

ning of the war to arouse sentiment against 
American resistance to German encroachments. 
Americans of German birth have been con- 
trolled very largely by leaders, often men of 
wealth, who directed them in their affairs great 
and small. This "system" took root in times 
when the immigrant, finding himself in a strange 
land and unfamiliar with its language, naturally 
sought counsel of his fellow countrymen who 
had already learned the ways of America. 
This form of leadership has established a curious 
habit of dependence, and makes against free- 
dom of thought and action in the humble while 
augmenting the power of the strong. It has 
been a common thing for German parents to en- 
courage in their children the idea of German 
superiority and Germany's destiny to rule the 
world. A gentleman whose parents, born in 
Germany, came to the Middle West fifty years 
ago told me recently that his father, who 
left Germany to escape mihtary service, had 
sought to inculcate these ideas in the minds of 
his children from their earliest youth. The 
sneer at American institutions has been very 
common among Germans of this type. Another 
young man of German ancestry complained 
bitterly of this contemptuous attitude toward 
things American. There was, he said, a group 



252 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

of men who met constantly in a German club- 
house to belittle A^nerica and exalt the joys of 
the fatherland. Their attitude toward their 
adopted country was condensed into an oft- 
repeated formula: "What shall we think of a 
people whose language does not contain an 
equivalent for Gemutlichkeit!'' 

As part of the year's record I may speak 
from direct knowledge of a situation with which 
we were brought face to face in Indianapolis, 
a city of three hundred thousand people, in a 
State in which the centre of population for the 
United States has been fixed by the federal 
census for two decades. Indiana's capital, we 
like to believe, is a typical American city. 
Here the two tides of migration from the East 
and the Southeast met in the first settlement. 
A majestic shaft in the heart of the town testi- 
fies to the participation of Indiana in all the 
American wars from the Revolution; in no 
other State perhaps is political activity so vigor- 
ous as here. It would seem that if there exists 
anywhere a healthy American spirit it might be 
sought here with confidence. The phrase "He's 
an honest German" nowhere conveyed a deeper 
sense of rectitude and probity. Men of Ger- 
man birth or ancestry have repeatedly held 
responsible municipal and county offices. And 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 253 

yet this city affords a striking instance of the 
deleterious effect of the preservation of the race 
group. It must be said that the community's 
spirit toward these citizens was the friendhest 
in the world; that in the first years of the 
European War allowances were generously made 
for family ties that still bound many to the 
fatherland and for pride and prejudice of race. 
There had never been any question as to the 
thorough assimilation of the greater number 
into the body of American democracy until the 
beginning of the war in 1914. 

When America joined with the Allies a silence 
fell upon those who had been supporting the 
German cause. The most outspoken of the 
German sympathizers yielded what in many 
cases was a grudging and reluctant assent 
to America's preparations for war. Others 
made no sign one way or the other. There 
were those who wished to quibble — who said 
that they were for America, of course, but that 
they were not for England; that England had 
begun the war to crush Germany;' that the 
stories of atrocities were untrue. As to the 
Lusitania, Americans had no business to dis- 
regard the warning of the Imperial German 
Government; and America "had no right" 
to ship munitions to Germany's enemies. Re- 



254 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

ports of disloyal speech or of active sedition on 
the part of well-known citizens were freely 
circulated. 

German influence in the public schools had 
been marked for years, and the president of the 
school board was a German, active in the 
affairs of the National German-American Alli- 
ance. The teaching of German in the grade 
schools was forbidden by the Indianapolis 
school commissioners last year, though it is 
compulsory under a State law where the parents 
of twenty-five children request it. It was 
learned that *'The Star-Spangled Banner" was 
sung in German in at least one public school as 
part of the instruction in the German language, 
and this was defended by German-Americans 
on the ground that knowledge of their national 
anthem in two languages broadened the chil- 
dren's appreciation of its beauties. One might 
wonder just how long the singing of "Die 
Wacht am Rhein" in a foreign language would 
be tolerated in Germany! 

We witnessed what in many cases was a 
gradual and not too hearty yielding to the 
American position, and what in others was a 
refusal to discuss the matter with a protest 
that any question of loyalty was an insult. 
Suggestions that a public demonstration by 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 255 

German-Americans, at a time when loyalty 
meetings were being held by American citizens 
everywhere, would satisfy public clamor and 
protect innocent sufferers from business boy- 
cotts and other manifestations of disapproval 
were met with indignation. The situation be- 
came acute upon the disclosure that the Inde- 
pendent Turnverein, a club with a handsome 
house that enrolled many Americans in its mem- 
bership, had on New Year's Eve violated the 
government food regulations. The president, 
who had been outspoken against Germany 
long before America was drawn into the war, 
made public apology, and as a result of the flurry 
steps were taken immediately to change the 
name of the organization to the Independent 
Athletic Club. On Lincoln's Birthday a patri- 
otic celebration was held in the club. On 
Washington's Birthday Das Deutsche Haus, the 
most important German social centre in the 
State, announced a change of its name to the 
Athenaeum. In his address on this occasion Mr. 
Carl H. Lieber said: 

With mighty resolve we have taken up arms to gain 
recognition for the lofty principles of a free people in un- 
alterable opposition to autocracy and military despotism. 
Emerging from the mists and smoke of battle, these Ameri- 
can principles, like brilliant handwriting in the skies, have 
been clearly set out by our President for the eyes of the 



256 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

world to see. Our country stands undivided for their 
realization. Impartially and unselfishly we are fighting, 
we feel, for justice in this world and the rights of mankind. 

This from a representative citizen of the second 
generation satisfactorily disposed of the question 
of loyalty, both as to the renamed organization 
and the majority of its more influential members. 
A little later the Mannerchor, another German 
club, changed its name to the Academy of 
Music. 

It is only just to say that, as against many 
evidences of a failure to assimilate, there is 
gratifying testimony that a very considerable 
number of persons of German birth or ancestry 
in these States have neither encouraged nor 
have they been affected by attempts to diffuse 
and perpetuate German ideas. Many German 
families — I know conspicuous instances in 
Western cities — are in no way distinguish- 
able from their neighbors of American stock. 
In one Middle Western city a German mechanic, 
who before coming to America served in the 
German army and is without any illusions as to 
the delights of autocracy, tells me that attach- 
ment to the fatherland is confined very largely 
to the more prosperous element, and that he 
encountered little hostiHty among the hum- 
bler people of German antecedents whom he 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 257 

attempted to convince of the justice of the 
American position. 

The National German-American Alliance, 
chartered by special act of Congress in 1901, 
was one of the most insidious and mischievous 
agencies for German propaganda in America. 
It was a device for correlating German societies 
of every character — turnvereins, music societies, 
church organizations, and social clubs, and it 
is said that the Alliance had 2,500,000 members 
scattered through forty-seven American States. 
"Our own prestige," recites one of its publica- 
tions, "depends upon the prestige of the father- 
land, and for that reason we cannot allow any 
disparagement of Germany to go unpunished." 
It was recited in the Alliance's statement of its 
aims that one of its purposes was to combat 
"nativistic encroachments." I am assured by 
a German -American that this use of "nativistic" 
does not refer to the sense in which it was 
used in America in the Know-Nothing period, 
but that it means merely resistance to puri- 
tanical infringements upon personal freedom, 
with special reference to prohibition. 

The compulsory teaching of German in the 
public schools was a frank item of the Alliance's 
programme. In his book, "Their True Faith 
and Allegiance" (1916), Mr. Gustavus Ohlinger, 



258 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

of Toledo, whose testimony before the Judiciary 
Comrnittee of the United States Senate at- 
tracted much attention last February, describes 
the systematic effort to widen the sphere of the 
teaching of German in Western States. Ohio 
and Indiana have laws requiring German to be 
taught upon the petition of parents. Before 
the repeal of a similar law in Nebraska last 
April we find that in Nebraska City the school 
board had been compelled by the courts to 
obey the law, though less than one-third of the 
petitioners really intended to have their chil- 
dren receive instruction in German. Mr. Ohl- 
inger thus describes the operation of the law in 
Omaha: 

In the city of Omaha . . . the State organizer of the 
Nebraska federation of German societies visited the 
schools recently and was more than pleased with what 
he found: the childern were acquiring a typically Berlin 
accent, sung a number of German songs to his entire 
approval, and finally ended by rendering "Die Wacht 
am Rhein'* with an enthusiasm and a gusto which could 
not be excelled among children of the fatherland. Four 
years ago Nebraska had only 90 high schools which offered 
instruction in German. To-day, so the Alliance reports, 
German is taught in 222 high schools and in the grade 
schools of nine cities. Omaha alone has 3,500 pupils 
taking German instruction. In addition to this, the 
State federation has been successful in obtaining an ap- 
propriation for the purchase of German books for the 
State circulating library. Germans have been urged to 
call for such books, in order to convince the State librarian 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 259 

that there is a popular demand and to induce further 
progress in this direction. 

These conditions have, of course, passed, and 
it is for those of us who would guard jealously 
our rights, and honestly fulfil our obligations, 
as American citizens to see to it that they do 
not recur. The Alliance announced its volun- 
tary dissolution some time before its charter 
was annulled, but the testimony before the King 
committee, which the government has published, 
will be an important source of material for the 
historian of the war. German propaganda and 
activity in the Middle West did little for the 
Kaiser but to make the word ''German" an 
odious term. "German" in business titles and 
in club names has disappeared and German 
language newspapers have in many instances 
changed their names or gone out of business. 
I question whether the end of the war will wit- 
ness any manifestations of magnanimity that 
will make possible a restoration of the teaching 
of German in primary and high schools. 

We of the Middle West, who had thought 
ourselves the especial guardians of American 
democracy, found with dismay that the mailed 
fist of Berlin was clutching our public schools. 
In Chicago, where so much time, money, and 
thought are expended in the attempt to Ameri- 



260 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

canize the foreign accretions, the spelHng-book 
used in the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and 
eighth grades consisted wholly of word-lists, 
with the exception of two exercises — one of 
ten lines, describing the aptness of the natives 
of Central Australia in identifying the tracks of 
birds and animals, and another which is here 
reproduced : 

THE KAISER IN THE MAKING 

In the gymnasium at Cassel the German Kaiser spent 
three years of his boyhood, a diligent but not a brilliant 
pupil, ranking tenth among seventeen candidates for the 
university. 

Many tales are told of this period of his life, and one 
of them, at least, is illuminating. 

A professor, it is said, wishing to curry favor with his 
royal pupil, informed him overnight of the chapter in Greek 
that was to be made the subject of the next day's lesson. 

The young prince did what many boys would not have 
done. As soon as the classroom was opened on the fol- 
lowing morning, he entered and wrote conspicuously on 
the blackboard the information that had been given him. 

One may say unhesitatingly that a boy capable of such 
an action has the root of a fine character in him, possesses 
that chivalrous sense of fair play which is the nearest thing 
to a religion that may be looked for at that age, hates 
meanness and favoritism, and will, wherever possible, ex- 
pose them. There is in him a fundamental bent toward 
what is clean, manly, and aboveboard. 

The copy of the book before me bears the im- 
print, *' Board of Education, City of Chicago, 
1914." The Kaiser's "'chivalrous sense of fair 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 261 

play" has, of course, ceased to be a matter of 
public instruction in the Western metropoHs. 

"Im Vaterland," a German reading-book 
used in a number of Western schools, states 
frankly in its preface that it was "made in Ger- 
many," and that "after the manuscript had 
been completed it was manifolded and copies 
were criticised by teachers in Prussia, Saxony, 
and Bavaria." 

In contrast with the equivocal loyalty of 
Germans who have sought to perpetuate and 
accentuate the hyphen, it is a pleasure to tes- 
tify to the admirable spirit with which the Jew- 
ish people in these Western States have re- 
peatedly manifested their devotion to America. 
Many of these are of German birth or the chil- 
dren of German immigrants, and yet I am aware 
of no instance of a German Jew in the region 
most familiar to me who has not warmly sup- 
ported the American cause. They have not 
only given generously to the Red Cross and to 
funds for French and Belgian relief, quite inde- 
pendently of their efforts in behalf of people of 
their own race in other countries, but they have 
rendered most important aid in all other branches 
of war activities. No finer declaration of whole- 
hearted Americanism has been made by any 
American of German birth than that expressed 



262 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

(significantly at Milwaukee) by Mr. Otto H. 
Kahn, of New York, last January: 

Until the outbreak of the war, in 1914, I maintained 
close and active personal and business relations in Ger- 
many. I was well acquainted with a number of the lead- 
ing personages of the country. I served in the German 
army thirty years ago. I took an active interest in fur- 
thering German art in America. I do not apologize for, 
nor am I ashamed of, my German birth. But I am 
ashamed — bitterly and grievously ashamed — of the 
Germany which stands convicted before the high tri- 
bunal of the world's public opinion of having planned and 
willed war, of the revolting deeds committed in Belgium 
and northern France, of the infamy of the Lusitania mur- 
ders, of innumerable violations of The Hague conventions 
and the law of nations, of abominable and perfidious plot- 
ting in friendly countries, and shameless abuse of their 
hospitality, of crime heaped upon crime in hideous defi- 
ance of the laws of God and man. 

A curious phase of this whole situation is the 
fact that so many thousands of Germans who 
found the conditions in their own empire in- 
tolerable and sought homes in America, should 
have fostered a sentimental attachment for the 
fatherland as a land of comfort and happiness, 
and of its ruler as a glorious Lohengrin afloat 
vipon the river of time in a swan-boat, in an 
atmosphere of charm and mystery, to the 
accompaniment of enchanting music. In their 
clubs and homes they so dreamed of this Ger- 
many and talked of it in the language of the 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 263 

land of their illusion that the sudden trans- 
formation of their knight of the swan-boat into 
a war lord of frightfulness and terror, seeking 
to plant his iron feet upon an outraged world, 
has only slowly penetrated to their compre- 
hension. It is clear that there has been on 
America's part a failure, that cannot be mini- 
mized or scouted, to communicate to many of 
the most intelligent and desirable of all our 
adopted citizens, the spirit of that America 
founded by Washington and saved by Lincoln, 
and all the great host who in their train — 

"spread from sea to sea 
A thousand leagues the zone of liberty, 
And gave to man this refuge from his past. 
Unkinged, unchurched, unsoldiered.'* 



IV 

In closing these papers it seems ungenerous 
to ignore the criticisms with which they were 
favored during their serial publication. To a 
gentleman in Colorado who insists that my 
definition and use of Folks and "folksiness" 
leave him in the dark as to my meaning, I can 
only suggest that a visit to certain communities 
which I shall be glad to choose for him, in the 
States of our central basin, will do much for his 



264 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

illumination. An intimation from another 
quarter that those terms as I have employed 
them originated in Kentucky does not distress 
me a particle, for are not we of Ohio, Indiana, 
and Illinois first cousins of the people across the 
Ohio? At once some one will rise to declare 
that all that is truly noble in the Middle West 
was derived from the Eastern States or from 
New England, and on this question I might with 
a good conscience write a fair brief on either side. 
With one Revolutionary great-grandfather, a 
native of Delaware, buried in Ohio, and another, 
a Carolinian, reposing in the soil of Kentucky, 
I should be content no matter where fell the 
judgment of the court. 

To the complaint of the Chicago lady who 
assailed the editor for his provincialism in per- 
mitting an Easterner to abuse her city, I de- 
mur that I was born and have spent most of 
the years of my life within a few hours of Chi- 
cago, a city dear to me from long and rather 
intimate acquaintance and hallowed by most 
agreeable associations. The Evening Post of 
Chicago, having found the fruits of my note- 
book "dull" as to that metropolis, must per- 
mit me to plead that in these stirring times 
the significant things about a city are not its 
clubs, its cabarets, or its galloping *'loop- 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 265 

hounds," but the efforts of serious-minded 
citizens of courage and vision to make it a 
better place to Hve in. The cynicism of those 
to whom the contemplation of such efforts is 
fatiguing, lacks novelty and is only tolerable in 
so far as it is a stimulus to the faithful workers 
in the vineyard. 

I have spoken of The Valley of Democracy 
as being in itself a romance, and the tale as 
written upon hill and plain and along lake and 
river is well-nigh unequalled for variety and in- 
terest in the annals of mankind. I must plead 
that the sketchiness of these papers is due not 
to any lack of respect for the work of soberer 
chroniclers, but is attributable rather to the 
humility with which I have traversed a region 
laboriously explored by the gallant company 
of scholars who have established Middle West- 
ern history upon so firm a foundation. It is 
the view of persons whose opinions are entitled 
to all respect that the winning of the West is 
the most significant and important phase of 
American history. Certain it is that the story 
wherever one dips into it immediately quickens 
the heart-beat, and it is a pleasure to note the 
devotion and intelligence with which materials 
for history have been assembled in all the States 
embraced in my general title. 



266 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

The great pioneer collector of historical ma- 
terial was Dr. Reuben Gold Thwaites, who 
made the Wisconsin Historical Society the most 
efficient local organization of its kind in the 
country. "He was the first," writes Dr. Clar- 
ence W. Alvord, of the University of Illinois, 
"to unite the State historical agent and the 
university department of history so that they 
give each other mutual assistance — a union 
which some States have brought about only 
lately with great difficulty, while others are still 
limping along on two ill-mated crutches." Dr. 
Thwaites was an indefatigable laborer in his 
chosen field, and an inspiring leader. He not 
only brought to light a prodigious amount of 
material and made it accessible to other scholars, 
but he communicated his enthusiasm to a note- 
worthy school of historians who have special- 
ized in "sections" of the broad fertile field into 
which he set the first plough. Where the land 
is so new it is surprising and not a little amus- 
ing that there should be debatable points of 
history, and yet the existence of these adds 
zest to the labors of the younger school of his- 
torical students and writers. State historical 
societies have in recent years assumed a new 
dignity and importance, due in great measure 
to the fine example set by Wisconsin under 
Dr. Thwaites's guidance. 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 267 

Frederick Jackson Turner is another historian 
whose interest in the West has borne fruit in 
works of value, and he has estabhshed new 
points of orientation for explorers in this field. 
He must always be remembered as one of the 
first to appreciate the significance of the West- 
ern frontier in American history, and by his 
writings and addresses he has done much to 
arouse respect for the branch in which he has 
speciaKzed. Nor shall I omit Dr. John H. 
Finley's ''The French in the Heart of America" 
as among recent valuable additions to historical 
literature. There is a charming freshness and 
an infectious enthusiasm in Dr. Finley's pages, 
attributable to his deep poetic feeling for the 
soil to which he was born. All writers of the 
history of the Northwest, of course, confess their 
indebtedness to Parkman, and it should not be 
forgotten that before Theodore Roosevelt be- 
came a distinguished figure in American pubHc 
hfe he had written ''The Winning of the West," 
which established a place for him among Ameri- 
can historians. 

A historical society was formed in Indiana in 
1830, but as no building was ever provided for 
its collection, many valuable records were lost 
when the State capitol was torn down thirty 
years ago. Many documents that should have 
been kept within the State found their way to 



268 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

Wisconsin — an appropriation by the tireless 
Thwaites of which Indiana can hardly complain 
in view of the fact that she has never provided 
for the proper housing of historical material. 
Still, interest in local history, much of it having 
an important bearing on the national life, has 
never wholly died, and in recent years the 
Indiana Historical Magazine and the labors of 
Jacob P. Dunn, James A. Woodburn, Logan 
Esarey, Daniel Waite Howe, Harlow Lindley, 
and other students and writers have directed 
attention to the richness of the local field. 

Illinois, slipping this year into her second cen- 
tury of statehood, is thoroughly awake to the 
significance of the Illinois country in Western 
development. Dr. Alvord, who, by his re- 
searches and writings, has illuminated many 
dark passages of Middle Western history, has 
taken advantage of the centenary to rouse the 
State to a new sense of its important share in 
American development. The investigator in 
this field is rewarded by the unearthing of 
treasures as satisfying as any that may fall 
to the hand of a Greek archaeologist. The 
trustees of the Illinois Historical Library sent 
Dr. Alvord to "sherlock" an old French docu- 
ment reported to be in the court-house of 
St. Clair county. Not only was this document 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 269 

found but the more important Cahokia papers 
were discovered, bearing upon the history of the 
IlUnois country during the British occupation 
and the American Revolution. IlKnois has un- 
dertaken a systematic survey of county archives, 
which inchides also a report upon manuscript 
material held by individuals, and the centenary 
is to have a fitting memorial in a five-volume 
State history to be produced by authoritative 
writers. 

Iowa, jealous of her history and traditions, 
has a State-supported historical society with a 
fine list of pubHcations to its credit. Under the 
direction of the society's superintendent, Dr. 
Benjamin F. Shambaugh, the search for ma- 
terial is thorough and persistent, and over 
forty volumes of historical material have been 
published. The Iowa public and college libra- 
ries are all branches of the society and deposi- 
tories of its publications. The Mississippi Val- 
ley Historical Association held its eleventh 
annual meeting this year in St. Paul to mark the 
dedication of the new building erected by the 
State for the use of the Minnesota Historical 
Society. 

The wide scope of Western historical inquiry 
is indicated in the papers of the Mississippi Val- 
ley Association, and its admirable quarterly 



270 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

review, in which we find monographs by the 
ethnologist, the speciaUst in exploration, and 
the student of political crises, such as the 
Lincoln-Douglas contest and the Greenback 
movement. Not only are the older Middle 
Western States producing historical matter of 
national importance but Montana and the 
Dakotas are inserting chapters that bind the 
Mississippi Valley to the picturesque annals of 
California in a continuous narrative. Minne- 
sota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, IlUnois, and 
Indiana have established an informal union 
for the prosecution of their work, one feature 
of which is the preparation of a ''finding list" 
of documents in Washington. This co-ordina- 
tion prevents duplication of labor and makes 
for unity of effort in a field of common interest. 



V 

I had hoped that space would permit a review 
in some detail of municipal government in a 
number of cities, but I may now emphasize 
only the weakness of a mere "form," or "sys- 
tem," where the electorate manifest too great a 
confidence in a device without the "follow-up" 
so essential to its satisfactory employment; 
and I shall mention Omaha, whose municipal 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 271 

struggle has been less advertised than that of 
some other Western cities. Omaha was fortu- 
nate in having numbered among its pioneers a 
group of men of unusual ability and foresight. 
First a military outpost and a trading centre 
for adventurous settlements, the building of the 
Union Pacific made it an important link between 
East and West, and, from being a market for 
agricultural products of one of the most fertile 
regions in the world, its interests have multi- 
plied until it now offers a most interesting study 
in the interdependence and correlation of eco- 
nomic factors. 

Like most other Western cities, Omaha grew 
so rapidly and was so preoccupied with business 
that its citizens, save for the group of the faithful 
who are to be found everywhere, left the matter 
of local government to the politicians. Bossism 
became intolerable, and with high hopes the 
people in 1912 adopted commission government; 
but the bosses, with their usual adaptability 
and resourcefulness, immediately captured the 
newly created offices. It is a fair consensus of 
local opinion that there has been little if any 
gain in economy or efficiency. Under the old 
charter city councilmen were paid $1,800; the 
commissioners under the new plan receive $4,500, 
with an extra $500 for the one chosen mayor. 



£72 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

Several of the commissioners are equal to their 
responsibilities, but a citizen who is a close 
student of such matters says that "while in 
theory we were to get a much higher grade of 
public servants, in fact we merely elected men 
content to work for the lower salary and doubled 
and tripled their pay. We still have $1,800 men 
in $4,500 jobs." However, at the election last 
spring only one of the city commissioners was 
re-elected, and Omaha is hoping that the present 
year will show a distinct improvement in the 
management of its public business. Local pride 
is very strong in these Western cities, and from 
the marked anxiety to show a forward-looking 
spirit and a praiseworthy sensitiveness to criti- 
cism we may look confidently for a steady gain 
in the field of municipal government. 

It is to be hoped that in the general awaken- 
ing to our imperfections caused by the war, there 
may be a widening of these groups of patient, 
earnest citizens, who labor for the rationaHza- 
tion of municipal government. The disposition 
to say that "as things have been they remain" 
is strong upon us, but it is worth remembering 
that Clough also bids us "say not the struggle 
naught availeth." The struggle goes on cou- 
rageously, and the number of those who concern 
themselves with the business of strengthening 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 273 

the national structure by pulling out the rotten 
timbers in our cities proceeds tirelessly. 

Western cities are constantly advertising 
their advantages and resources, and offer- 
ing free sites and other inducements to manu- 
facturers to tempt them to move; but it occurs 
to me that forward-looking cities may present 
their advantages more alluringly by perfecting 
their local government and making this the 
burden of their appeal. We shall get nowhere 
with commission government or the city-man- 
ager plan until cities realize that no matter 
how attractive and plausible a device, it is worth- 
less unless due consideration is given to the 
liuman equation. It is very difficult to find 
qualified administrators under the city-manager 
plan. A successful business man or even a 
trained engineer may fail utterly, and we seem 
to be at the point of creating a new profession 
of great opportunities for young men (and 
women too) in the field of municipal administra- 
tion. At the University of Kansas and perhaps 
elsewhere courses are offered for the training of 
city managers. The mere teaching of municipal 
finance and engineering will not suffice; the 
courses should cover social questions and kindred 
matters and not neglect the psychology involved 
in the matter of dealing fairly and justly with 



274 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

the public. By giving professional dignity to 
positions long conferred upon the incompetent 
and venal we should at least destroy the cynical 
criticism that there are no men available for 
the positions created; and it is conceivable 
that once the idea of fitness has become im- 
planted in a careless and indifferent public a 
higher standard will be set for all elective oflSces. 



VI 

No Easterner possessed of the slightest deli- 
cacy will read what follows, which is merely a 
memorandum for my friends and neighbors of 
the great Valley. We of the West have never 
taken kindly to criticism, chiefly because it has 
usually been offered in a spirit of condescension, 
or what in our extreme sensitiveness we have 
been rather eager to believe to be such. In our 
comfortable towns and villages we may admit 
weaknesses the mention of which by our cousins 
in partibus infidelium arouses our deepest ire. 
We shall not meekly suffer the East in its dis- 
dainful moods to play upon us with the light 
lash of its irony; but among ourselves we may 
confess that at times we have profited by East- 
ern criticism. After all, there is no spirit of 
the West that is very different from the spirit 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 275 

of the East. Though I only whisper it, we 
have, I think, rather more humor. We are 
friendlier, less snobbish, more sanguine in our 
outlook upon public matters, and have a greater 
confidence in democracy than the East. I have 
indicated with the best heart in the world cer- 
tain phases and tendencies of our provinces that 
seem to me admirable, and others beside which 
I have scratched a question-mark for the con- 
templation of the sober-minded. I am disposed 
to say that the most interesting thing about us 
is our politics, but that, safely though we have 
ridden the tempest now and again, these be 
times when it becomes us to ponder with a new 
gravity the weight we carry in the national scale. 
Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michi- 
gan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wiscon- 
sin wield 145 votes of the total of 531 in the 
electoral college; and in 1916 Mr. Wilson's 
majority was only 23. The poHtical judgment 
of the nation is likely, far into the future, to be 
governed by the West. We dare not, if we 
would, carry our responsibilities lightly. We 
have of late been taking our politics much more 
seriously; a flexibility of the vote, apparent in 
recent contests, is highly encouraging to those 
of us who see a hope and a safety in the multi- 
plication of the independents. But even with 



276 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

this we have done Httle to standardize pubhc 
service; the ablest men of the West do not 
govern it, and the fact that this has frequently 
been true of the country at large can afford 
us no honest consolation. There is no reason 
why, if we are the intelligent, proud sons of 
democracy we imagine ourselves to be, we 
should not so elevate our poHtical standards as 
to put other divisions of the republic to shame. 
There are thousands of us who at every election 
vote for candidates we know nothing about, or 
for others we would not think of intrusting with 
any private affair, and yet because we find 
their names under a certain party emblem we 
cheerfully turn over to such persons important 
public business for the honest and efficient 
transaction of which they have not the slightest 
qualification. What I am saying is merely a 
repetition of what has been said for years with- 
out marked effect upon the electorate. But 
just now, when democracy is fighting for its life 
in the world, we do well to give serious heed to 
such warnings. If we have not time or patience 
to perform the services required of a citizen who 
would be truly self-governing, then the glory of 
fighting for free institutions on the battle-fields 
of Europe is enormously diminished. 

The coming of the war found the West rather 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 277 

hard put for any great cause upon which to 
expend its energy and enthusiasm. We need 
a good deal of enthusiasm to keep us "up to 
pitch," and I shall not scruple to say that, in 
spite of our fine showing as to every demand 
thus far made by the war, the roll of the drums 
really found us inviting the reproach passed by 
the prophet upon them "that he upon beds of 
ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, 
and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves 
out of the midst of the stall." Over and over 
again, as I have travelled through the West 
in recent years, it has occurred to me that 
sorely indeed we needed an awakening. Self- 
satisfaction and seK-contemplation are little 
calculated to promote that clear thinking and 
vigorous initiative that are essential to trium- 
phant democracy. Yes ; this may be just as true 
of East or South; but it is of the West that we 
are speaking. I shall go the length of saying 
that any failure of democracy "to work" here 
in America is more heavily chargeable upon us 
of these Middle Western States than upon our 
fellow Americans in other sections. For here 
we are young enough to be very conscious of all 
those processes by which States are formed 
and pohtical and social order established. Our 
fathers or our grandfathers were pioneers; and 



278 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

from them the tradition is fresh of the toil 
and aspiration that went to the making of these 
commonwealths. We cannot deceive ourselves 
into believing that they did all that was neces- 
sary to perpetuate the structure, and that it is 
not incumbent upon us to defend, strengthen, 
and renew what they fashioned. We had, like 
many of those who have come to us from over 
the sea to share in our blessings, fallen into the 
error of assuming that America is a huge cor- 
poration in which every one participates in the 
dividends without reference to his part in earn- 
ing them. Politically speaking, we have too 
great a number of those who "hang on behind" 
and are a dead weight upon those who bear the 
yoke. We must do better about this; and in 
no way can the West prove its fitness to wield 
power in the nation than through a quickening 
of all those forces that tend to make popular 
government an intelligently directed implement 
controlled by the fit, and not a weapon caught 
up and exercised ignorantly by the unfit. 

Again, still speaking as one Westerner to an- 
other, our entrance into the war found us danger- 
ously close to the point of losing something that 
was finely spiritual in our forebears. I am 
aware that an impatient shrug greets this 
suggestion. The spires and towers of innumer- 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 279 

able churches decorate the Western sky-Hne, and 
I accept them for what they represent, without 
discussing the efficiency of the modern church 
or its failure or success in meeting the problems 
of modern life. There was apparent in the first 
settlers of the Mississippi valley a rugged spiritu- 
ality that accounted for much in their achieve- 
ments. The West was a lonesome place and re- 
ligion — Catholic and Protestant — filled a need 
and assisted greatly in making wilderness and 
plain tolerable. The imagination of the pio- 
neer was quickened and brightened by the 
promise of things that he believed to be eternal; 
the vast sweep of prairie and woodland deep- 
ened his sense of reliance upon the Infinite. 
This sense so happily interpreted and fittingly 
expressed by Lincoln is no longer discernible — 
at least it is not obtrusively manifest — and 
this seems to me a lamentable loss. Here, 
again, it may be said that this is not peculiar 
to the West; that we have only been affected 
by the eternal movement of the time spirit. 
And yet this elementary confidence in things 
of the spirit played an important part in the 
planting of the democratic ideal in the heart of 
America, and we can but deplore the passing of 
what to our immediate ancestors was so satisfy- 
ing and stimulating. And here, as with other 



280 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

problems that I have passed with only the most 
superficial note, I have no solution, if indeed 
any be possible. I am fully conscious that I 
fumble for something intangible and elusive; 
and it may be that I am only crying vainly for 
the restoration of something that has gone for- 
ever. Perhaps this war came opportunely to 
break our precipitate rush toward materialism, 
and the thing we were apparently losing, the 
old enthusiasm for higher things, the greater 
leisure for self-examination and self-commu- 
nion, may come again in the day of peace. 

"There is always," says Woodberry, "an 
ideality of the human spirit" visible in all the 
works of democracy, and we need to be re- 
minded of this frequently, for here in the 
heart of America it is of grave importance that 
we remain open-minded and open-hearted to 
that continuing idealism which must be the 
strength and stay of the nation. 

Culture, as we commonly use the term, 
may properly be allowed to pass as merely an- 
other aspect of the idealism "deep in the general 
heart of man" that we should like to believe to 
be one of the great assets of the West. Still 
addressing the Folks, my neighbors, I will 
temerariously repeat an admission tucked into 
an earlier chapter, that here is a field where we 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 281 

do well to carry ourselves modestly. There was 
an impression common in my youth that cul- 
ture of the highest order was not only possible 
in the West but that we Westerners were pe- 
culiarly accessible to its benignant influences 
and very likely to become its special guardians 
and apostles. Those were times when life was 
less complex, when the spirituality stirred by 
the Civil War was still very perceptible, when 
our enthusiasms were less insistently presented 
in statistics of crops and manufactures. We 
children of those times were encouraged to keep 
Emerson close at hand, for his purifying and 
elevating influence, and in a college town which 
I remember very well the professor of Greek was 
a venerated person and took precedence in any 
company over the athletic director. 

In those days, that seem now so remote, it 
was quite respectable to speak of the humanities, 
and people did so without self-consciousness. 
But culture, the culture of the humanities, 
never gained that foothold in the West that had 
been predicted for it. That there are few signs 
of its permanent establishment anywhere does 
not conceal our failure either to implant it 
or to find for it any very worthy substitute. 
We have valiantly invested millions of dollars 
in education and other millions in art museums 



282 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

and in libraries without any resulting diffusion 
of what we used to be pleased to call culture. 
We dismiss the whole business quite characteris- 
tically by pointing with pride to handsome 
buildings and generous endowments in much 
the same spirit that we call attention to a new 
automobile factory. There are always the few 
who profit by these investments; but it is not 
for the few that we design them; it is for the 
illumination of the great mass that we spend 
our treasure upon them. The doctrine of the 
few is the old doctrine of "numbers" and "the 
remnant," and even at the cost of reconstructing 
human nature we promised to show the world 
that a great body of people in free American 
States could be made sensitive and responsive 
to beauty in all its forms. The humanities still 
struggle manfully, but without making any 
great headway against adverse currents. The 
State universities offer an infinite variety of 
courses in literature and the fine arts, and they 
are served by capable and zealous instructors, 
but with no resulting progress against the tide 
of materialism. "Culture," as a friend of mine 
puts it, "is on the blink." We hear reassuring 
reports of the State technical schools where the 
humanities receive a niggardly minimum of at- 
tention, and these institutions demand our heart- 



THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 283 

lest admiration for the splendid work they are 
doing. But our development is lamentably one- 
sided; we have merely groups of cultivated 
people, just as older civilizations had them, not 
the great communities animated by ideals of 
nobility and beauty that we were promised. 

In the many matters which we of the West 
shall be obliged to consider with reference to 
the nation and the rest of the world as soon as 
Kultur and its insolent presumptions have been 
disposed of, culture, in its ancient and honor- 
able sense, is quite likely to make a poor fight 
for attention. And yet here are things, already 
falling into neglect, which we shall do well to 
scan once and yet again before parting company 
with them forever. There are balances as be- 
tween materialism and idealism which it is de- 
sirable to maintain if the fineness and vigor of 
democracy and its higher inspirational values 
are to be further developed. Our Middle West- 
ern idealism has been expending itself in chan- 
nels of social and political betterment, and it 
remains to be seen whether we shall be able to 
divert some part of its energy to the history, 
the Hterature, and the art of the past, not for 
cultural reasons merely but as part of our com- 
bat with provincialism and the creation of a 
broad and informed American spirit. 



284 THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY 

"Having in mind things true, things ele- 
vated, things just, things pure, things amiable, 
things of good report — having these in mind, 
studying and loving these, is what saves States," 
wrote Matthew Arnold thirty years ago. In 
the elaboration of a programme for the future of 
America that shall not ignore what is here con- 
noted there is presented to the Middle West 
abundant material for new enthusiasms and 
endeavors, commensurate with its opportunities 
and obligations not merely as the Valley of 
Democracy but as the Valley of Decision. 

The End. 



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